Beyond the Seven Lands and Seas: A landscape shaped by lava

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Leaving Tangwick Haa Museum, we made our next stop at Stenness, once home to one of Shetland’s busiest fishing ports. Stenness was very well situated as a port, as the opposite island sheltered it from the south-west winds. 18.-19. In the 19th century, during the summer fishing season, up to 40 seven-person boats went to sea from Stenness. One can only imagine the hustle and bustle on the coast. The Shetlanders caught fish in open boats about nine meters long, which were propelled by both sails and oars. The fishing trips of the boats even extended up to 65 kilometers from the coast. In the heyday of the port, the entire coast was full of small houses with peat roofs – bods, which were used both for storing fishing equipment and for living – after all, the fishing season meant that the fishermen stayed there for weeks and the catch was also dried or salted there. One of the bods was grander than the others – its first floor was used as both a storage room and a house, while the second was the living quarters of the overseer appointed by the landowner.

Now Stenness is quiet, and only a few ruins of buildings along the coast and a large cross erected on top of the hill bear witness to the former bustling port. The cross has been a sea mark. There is also a lighthouse not too far from the harbor, but the coast is dangerous near it, and the cross marked the nearest safe harbor to the lighthouse.

The gentle, sandy harbor contrasts with the rest of the coast, which has been shaped by lava from a volcanic eruption 360 million years ago, which in turn has been polished and shaped by the sea. The Stenness Geopark has been created to protect these volcanic rocks. Right near the port, the attention was attracted by the larger and smaller rock figures and formations jutting out of the water, one of the most peculiar of which is called Dore Holm. Holm is a Scandinavian word that we are also familiar with, meaning a flat or islet, while Dore comes from the English word door (door). Indeed, the opening resembles a door in a cliff rising from the sea.

Next to the harbor, the coast is not very high, but the red-black igneous rocks add drama to it, from the cracks of which small pink-flowered plants stubbornly stretched out, and on the sides of which sea shells were attached during high tide.