VisitShetland

Lunnasting

Exploring Lunnasting

A couple of miles north of Billister is the Laxo Burn, a famous beat for sea trout. Other good angling lochs in the district include Burga Water, Vidlin Loch, Kirkhouse Loch, Starns Water, Laxo Water and Sey Water.

From Laxo the roll-on/roll-off ferry sails for Whalsay across Dury Voe. In strong south-easterly winds the ferry docks instead at the village of Vidlin, terminal for the Out Skerries ferry.

Vidlin lies on Vidlin Voe, a sheltered inlet with a marina for local boats at its head. This is an ancient settlement with an Iron Age broch lying under the foundations of the present Methodist kirk.

The schist and gneiss rocks of the district are eroded relics of the ancient Caledonian Mountains, formed over 500 million years ago and carved by ice into whale-backed hills and long inlets. When the ice melted around 12,000 years ago it left many textbook features of a glaciated landscape - channels cut through hilltops, over-deepened valleys, curiously-shaped rock outcrops and huge amounts of debris, or moraine.

In the days before roads, when most cargo and passengers travelled by sea, the headland of Lunna was at the centre of Shetland commerce. Vessels sailing to Lerwick from the North Isles, Yell Sound and the West Mainland would call at the natural harbour of West Lunna Voe, overlooked by Lunna House, the 17th century mansion of the Hunter family.

Nearby is 'Hunter's Monument', a watchtower built by the lairds to spy on tenants fishing offshore - and also to watch out for the Customs! The Hunters, like most Shetland landowners, were smugglers.

Lunna is famous as one of the secret wartime bases for the little fishing boats that smuggled spies, saboteurs, radios, ammunition and explosives into Nazi-occupied Norway and brought back refugees from the Gestapo. The story of these heroic and terrifying voyages, in midwinter darkness, storms and often under enemy fire, is told in 'The Shetland Bus' by David Howarth, the British naval officer who helped run the operation from Lunna House. Below the house is the stone pier from where so many brave Norwegian Resistance fighters sailed to their deaths.

In the early 1970s Lunna came to national attention when then Ninian oilfield pipeline was laid across the peninsula on its way to the Sullom Voe Oil Terminal. Careful landscaping ensured the huge project left few scars.

North of Lunna lies some wild and wonderful walking country - Lunna Ness, studded with the ruins of croft houses from the Clearances in the 19th century. The area teems with wildlife: in summer there is a constant stream of seabirds passing the headland - Gannet (solan in Shetland dialect), Common Guillemot (lomvi), Razorbill (wilkie or sea craa), Kittiwake (wheeg) and Puffin (tammie norie) - while migrant birds such as Pied Wagtails, Waxwings, Redwings and various geese alight here in spring and autumn, when sheltered bushes at Larrimas, Garden, Sweening and Lunna attract warblers and thrushes.

A thriving but elusive Otter population has made Lunna Ness a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). Lochs and streams provide the fresh water essential for coastal otters to bathe after fishing in the sea. Banks of soft peat conceal their holts, or hadds.

Much easier to see are Common and Grey Seals (selkies) hauled out at colonies on the skerries between the ness and Lunna Holm and at the Skerry of Lunning.

Not far away are the lonely Loch of Stofast and the mysterious Stanes of Stofast - a 2,000-tonne 'glacial erratic' boulder, rafted from Norway on the ice and split in two by frost. Like the nearby Lunning peninsula, this is a heavily glaciated landscape with eerily-shaped rocks associated with the trows (trolls) of Shetland folklore.

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2009 Photo Competition

VisitShetland is pleased to announce the launch of their 5th annual photocompetition.  This year's theme is 'Shetland's Wild Side'.

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