Lerwick, Scotland and a Visit with History

 We arrived in Lerwick to a grey-ish day, but the weather was supposed to improve for our visit to Mousa Island. This small island is famed for the broch, or iron age tower, that stands guard there. It is the best preserved one in all of Scotland. Along with seeing the broch, we would have a hike around the island.

Our bus ride was only about 20 minutes, and our guide Amy, who is also a high school chemistry teacher, gave us a lot of information along the way.

The island of Mousa is currently privately owned and is leased out to a farmer to graze his sheep. The island is also a bird sanctuary, preserved by the RSPB, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. There is no fee to visit, but you do have to pay for the boat ride from the 'mainland' and back.

This lovely manor house belongs to the owner
of Mousa Island. Both have been in the family
for hundreds of years.

                                      

As we got closer to the island we started to see some of the 300 sheep that are allowed to wander the whole island.

Once we arrived on the island, we started our walk toward the Broch, following a herd of sheep from one pasture area to another. We all had to watch our feet VERY carefully to avoid stepping in fresh sheep dung as we walked.

The island is only inhabited by the sheep today, but had a fairly long recent - that is within the last couple of hundred years - history of habitation. The ruins here are the remains of a house known as The Haa. It was built by James Pyper, who owned the island in the late 1700s, as a place where he could keep his wife away from alcohol while he was away at sea. Apparently that didn't work too well, since there was a lot of black market trade in tobacco and gin at the time, and Mousa island became a good place to stash the contraband, so she managed to maintain her supply. After she died, James remarried and his second wife Anne lived there quite happily until her death in 1852.

                                        

The Broch itself is quite a structure. It is estimated to be between 2,000 and 2,500 years old, built by Vikings during the Iron Age. It isn't known exactly what the main use of the tower was, but it likely involved defense among others. It is made of stones piled together without any type of binding material. For this reason, the small Storm Petrels use it as a nesting site in the thousands every year.

It is thought that the reason this Broch wasn't torn down to provide building materials was that there was so much stone available on the island and the mainland that they didn't need the stone from the broch.

The stone walls are 5 metres 'thick' but have a staircase of rough hewn and narrow steps winding around in the middle. Most of us on the tour decided to brave the steps so we could get the view from the top of the tower. It is nice that there's an iron railing there now, although you had to pick up a flashlight or use the one on your phone to be able to see the stairs near the bottom.

You can see how the tower was built with layer upon layer of
stones. 

The opening inside the tower. It is now covered
with a large mesh to keep big birds from coming
inside and robbing the Storm Petrel nests. The
openings in the wall allow some light to get into the staircase
to the top.

The views from the top of the tower are quite spectacular, and it is easy to see how useful it would be as a defense structure. I came down the stairs backward; they were only wide enough to hold half of my shoe - better the toe half than the heel. As Amy said, this would probably be the oldest staircase that any of us would ever climb!

And looking straight down from 13 metres up. Yes,
that's Larry on the right.

Once we were done with the Broch, we started our longer walk around the island. The lighthouse in the distance was put up after the shipwreck that left the bit of structure in the foreground. There were 2 ships wrecked at the island, with no loss of life, but the lighthouse was moved from the mainland to Mousa to prevent any future occurrences.

Our hike around the island took about an hour and a half, and when we returned to the dock to catch the boat, there were lots more people around so we were glad we'd had the chance to see the tower by ourselves.

                                

On our way back to the ship, our driver took us around the main streets of Lerwick to show us some of the lovely buildings there. Lerwick is where the BBC Scotland mystery series 'Shetland' is filmed, for anyone who may follow this police crime drama.

                            

And we had some other good views during our sailout, as we went past the city's downtown area.

And finally as we sailed on toward the Highlands, we passed the Bressay Lighthouse. Bressay Island and the mainland create a sort of sound that allowed Lerwick to become an important harbour and settlement. This lighthouse is now a Marine Heritage Centre.