Inside Category Archives
The Laurel
The Shetland Times, 12 October 1907 reported an important event at the Ness. Harry Irvine of Glenfield got a Fifie fishing boat, the ...
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Letters on Shetland
I got a book in the post the other day, always a good thing. 'Letters on Shetland' by Peter Jamieson (1898-1976), published in 1949 ...
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World Book Day
On World Book Day, it is worth musing about the history of library collections in Shetland. There have been highs and lows in the ...
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550 Years Ago: how Shetland became part of Scotland - part 2
Shetland and Orkney became part of Scotland 550 years ago, on 20 February 1472. Denmark’s economic interests were concentrated in ...
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A reminiscence of a traditional Shetland wedding
When lockdown came, one of our first sad tasks was to tell two couples who’d planned a wedding in the museum that it couldn’t ...
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550 Years Ago: how Shetland became part of Scotland
A fortnight ago some women and men from the South Mainland of Shetland marched in Glasgow with torches. They were commemorating the ...
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Up Helly Aa - the Venues
We’re missing Up Helly Aa again - not just a fire spectacle but a major social event, with dances and performances in many venues in ...
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Origins of the Up Helly Aa Song
A huge procession of torch-carrying guizers is one of the most spectacular sights of the Shetland year. For anyone who heads out in ...
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The New Year, 1872 and the Truck Commission
The New Year of 1872 began in a special way in Shetland. On the first of January Sheriff William Guthrie began hearings in the Queens ...
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Accounts with Women Labourers
Thomas Hardy, probably the Victorian novelist most familiar with the grit of rural life, described the work of his agricultural ...
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The Fenian Raid on Unst
Shetlanders have long enjoyed jokes, pranks, and hoaxes, aka “plunkies.” Sometimes these have stretched to include British ...
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The real story behind the Shetland wulver
In recent years there has been a lot of discussion about the ‘wulver’, Shetland’s ‘kind and generous werewolf’, as someone ...
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Witchcraft in Shetland
Between around 1615 and 1680 Shetland was afflicted by a mania that was disturbing other parts of Europe. Ordinary Shetlanders and ...
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