Writer Ron McMillan (www.ronmcmillan.com) has spent weeks travelling the isles' many unbeaten tourist tracks to compile a very readable collection of encounters with local people reflecting 21st century Shetland.
Publisher Sandstone Press will be launching 'BETWEEN WEATHERS - Travels in 21st century Shetland'  in the Lerwick tourist office on Friday 6 June.
Here The Shetland News publishes a second excerpt from the book: 'Hiking alone in Hermaness, Unst.'
 

By now I am reduced to mincing, grandma-in-a-tight-skirt paces up a slope so sodden with run-off that it washes over the toes of my boots. Concentration alone gets me from one waymark post to the next; far too tired to be so far from civilisation, I pause to catch my breath and look back once more.

Visibility to the south and west has improved beyond belief. I can look out along an imaginary line that runs directly south-west across the rippled North Atlantic to kiss the northernmost points of both the island of Yell and the tip of Fethaland.

The sky is a mottled grey curtain that obscures all sign of a sun that dips towards the horizon, a curtain unbroken save for two perfectly placed openings that send fat golden goko beams downwards -- one each to fall precisely upon the tips of Yell and Fethaland. This is what they used to call a Kodak Moment, and here I am, camera-free, because I was certain it was going to rain today.

Legs like overcooked noodles, I trudge along a soggy sheep track, eyes on wherever boots land lest I go over on an ankle. Break an ankle now, and if I am lucky, Eve and Patrick will raise the alarm in a few hours, meaning I could spend the night up here.

By now, gaps between stops for breath are decreasing, and at the next such pause, I raise my eyes from the trail -- and there she is. Muckle Flugga Lighthouse, first built by Robert Louis Stevenson’s father Thomas Stevenson in 1854 to lend protection to troop ships headed for the Crimean War. There is a horrible irony about a government concerned for the safety of troops in transit towards a hideous conflict that will cost so many of them their lives. The 1854 tower was a temporary structure, and the present one, twenty metres tall and perched sixty metres up the jagged rock island, has cast its beam across some of the wildest waters in Britain for nearly one hundred and fifty years.

In his wonderful book Art Rambles in Shetland, published in 1869, artist and author John T. Reid described a storm that lashed Muckle Flugga lighthouse in January 1868.

‘The waves of the North Sea were breaking over it, although the rock on which it is built is two hundred feet in height, and the light-room stands sixty feet higher.’

One last hilltop sits between me and the return route to the bicycle. My compass tells me that the waymark posts now point south, reaching up a slope not far short of forty-five degrees from horizontal. It goes on and on, and the change of direction invites the strong southerly wind to do its spiteful best to impede every step, to make each uphill pace a trial for legs and lungs that are already close to their limits.

It slows me to the point that ever-more frequent stops are required to heave at moist salt-laden air, pauses which allow me to turn and re-savour the view of Muckle Flugga and beyond it, Out Stack -- the British Isles’ final geological punctuation mark.

At last, a wind-damaged climber’s cairn breaks the skyline, and I seek out a neat striated stone triangle, which I sit near the cairn’s top so that one apex points directly down the slope I have just weathered, due north to Muckle Flugga.

When trekking, a firm safety rule dictates that if you wait until you feel thirsty it is too late, and by now I am seriously dehydrated. But at least here, on the top of the headland, the landscape levels out just enough for water to lie. I fashion a drinking vessel from a plastic bag and scoop peaty-brown fluid from a table-top-sized rainwater pond. Ignoring all thoughts of sheep droppings, I slurp long and deep at water so chilled that it makes my teeth ache.

Nothing, no drink consumed anywhere in over forty-five years and as many countries travelled, ever tasted better, and months later, I can still summon up the taste of the peat. At least, I hope it is peat.

Beneath the cairn, the land bolts downwards to the north coast and dives off the cliff face into North Atlantic waters. A few hundred metres out, standing proud upon massive rock slabs that themselves teeter at steep angles forced upon them millions of years ago by tectonic shifts, is the lighthouse whose beam reaches out, weather permitting, thirty-five kilometres in all directions. When the light was built, it was such a challenge that it cost £32,000 in 1857 money -- something like £20 million today. I call that a small price to pay for 150 years, and counting, of lives saved.
 
Back then the island it perched upon was known as North Unst, and not until 1964 was it changed to Muckle Flugga, from the Old Norse Mikla Flugey, a name whose romantic ring is at odds with its translation of ‘large, steep-sided island’.

From the completion of the temporary lighthouse in 1854 through to the automation of the light in 1995, it was the northernmost populated point in the British Isles. Which right now makes me the northernmost soul in the nation. It is a solitary experience worth savouring while, for a few short minutes, every single one of sixty-odd million Britons is, well, beneath me.

Now darkness is coming in like a raging storm, and fired up by peat bog water, I cut a downhill dash straight into a southerly gale, towards where I hope a borrowed bicycle awaits.

Of course it is still there, but so too are more than ten kilometres of cycling into that southerly, in near-total darkness and without lights. Long before I reach Baltasound I bear the physical imprint of what marathon runners call ‘the wall’, after which I slip into a fatigue fugue state. When I pull into the empty car park of the village shop in desperate need of nutrition, it is a few minutes past six o’clock, and I am glad beyond belief to find the lights on and the door unlocked. A lady behind the counter looks at me with kindly bemusement.
‘I was hoping you didn’t close at six,’ I say.
Her smile wears what I interpret as a hint of self-indulgence.
‘I close when I feel like it.’

Also available to preview: On the ferry to Lerwick

See also our story: 21st century Shetland travelogue

'Between Weathers' is available from www.amazon.co.uk as of 15 May.
Ron McMillan will sign copies of his book in the Shetland Times bookshop on 7 June. He and Bob Davidson of Sandstone Press will also be present at the Classic Motor Show, in Lerwick, that weekend.