IN SEARCH OF THE LAST SHETLAND SHEEPDOG BREEDERS IN SHETLAND
On the walls of the stairway to the rooms were heads of tigers and antelopes, and on the floor was the skin and head of a bear. The walls of one of the rooms were completely decorated with prints, cut out from old magazines from the late 19th century. The bed, furniture, and bathroom were also in the very same style, as if I was thrown back into time. It was all very promising. It was the former children’s room that I was in, and the prints on the walls showed many lovely old pictures of children with dogs, the ones you could find on old tin biscuit boxes. I was asked to be on time downstairs for dinner. As the Shet- land Islands, and certainly the more remote places, don’t have res- taurants at every corner, I wisely had chosen to rent a room all-in, and this proved to be a wise decision. The lady of the house was an excellent cook. After dinner, I had a lovely and entertaining evening around the old fireplace, talking with them along with another couple of residents about my plans for the coming days. Hermaness National Nature Reserve was high on my list, and the Edmonstons offered to bring me to the entrance and stressed to me to be on time for dinner in the evening. The reserve was a project of my host’s forefather, Dr. L. Edmondston, a botanist who started to protect the Skuas (called Bronxies here), which were as good as extinct. This was back in 1831. Nowadays, around 100,000 seabirds are nesting here. It is now managed by the Scot- tish Natural Heritage, but the reserve is still the property of my host. I planned to go back walking, no need for them to come and pick me up. The reserve itself reveals a lot of the terrain that is common on these islands. Peat is omnipresent here. Grasslands on rocks are intersected by numerous little streams that sometimes, suddenly, disappear underground and reemerge often hundreds of meters away. If you wander around here without knowing the ter- rain, you can unknowingly end up in real danger and fall in an earth hole, right into such an underground stream. Those gaps can sometimes be deep too, and fatal for small dogs. Our small Shelties would probably take no such chance, and I start to doubt if the little companions, like we know them today, would make it here. As a working breed, I seriously have my doubts. From west to east coasts, none of the islands are wider than 16km [9 miles] and it did not take very long before I ended up at the western cliffs of the reserve, the northernmost point of the UK. This stunning coastline offers spectacular cliffs where thousands of seabirds are nesting. Unfortunately, the cute and funny-looking Puffins were already gone. At a certain point, the cliffs were cut downwards, and I was treated to an enormous spectacle; thousands of Gannets were nesting, flying on and off to feed the chicks that were almost ready to fly out to the sea. The Hermaness Reserve hosts around 12,000 of these birds. I know how dangerous these places can be, but I could not help but go as near as was safe to the edge, taking my time to take some stunning pictures and enjoy the numerous birds sailing right in front of me, 170 meters [557
“The Inn on the Hill” in Whiteness. This hotel is situated between Sumburgh and the capital, Lerwick, and its pub proved a popular meeting place for the locals from far around. While checking in, the hotel manager, who was also the barkeeper, inquired about the intentions of my visit to the islands, and I told him about my plans to search for the last breeders of the Shetland Sheepdog. He looked at me as if he’d never heard about a local breed named after the islands. I also asked him about the possibility to see the Northern Lights that could be seen from September on, if you were lucky. Some of the customers frowned at me and told me that they never saw it. But the manager contradicted them and claimed to have witnessed it a few times, but it was a matter of luck. After dinner, I mixed it up a little with some locals who were shooting pool, when suddenly the manager called me and asked me to come outside. “Sir, you wanted to see the Northern Lights, no? Well, come and see outside.” My heart bounced with enthusiasm. “I was taking some crates of beer out of my trunk and looked up to the sky and there it was,” he said, obviously sharing the same enthusiasm as me. I looked up to the sky as all the other locals followed me out too in disbelieve… and a minute later, we were all breathless and silent, overwhelmed by the spooky spectacle above our heads. Like endless stage curtains, the lights moved fluently, rolling like waves from green to yellow and to blue. The hotel manager closed down all the lights inside and outside on the parking lot, and the only thing we were missing was a Peer Gynt symphony playing in the background. This is one of the experiences that follows you for the rest of your days, like meeting whales or a group of elephants, or discovering a huge waterfall in a jungle. I felt so lucky that on my very first night on the islands I was experiencing something the majority of people would envy me for. The next day, still excited about what I’d witnessed the previ- ous night, I took off towards Baltasound on the island Unst, the highest situated island of the Shetlands. I was welcomed by my hosts, the Laird and his wife, and David and Jennifer Edmondston and their dog in their manor, Bunnest House, which looked even more promising than it appeared on the Internet. It was not the most strategic place to discover the islands, but it certainly offered the best way to experience them. The house was located near a bay, and it was rather misty when I arrived. After the customary introductions, I was shown my room. Apparently, the owners were descendants of a noble family with a tradition of exploring nature.
82 | SHOWSIGHT MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 2021
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