Melby Beach

Friday 30th June

This planet. How many lives would you need to live all the places that appeal? I could certainly spend one of them on Shetland. It has a coastline of more than 1700 miles, varying from extremes of boulder-strewn wild-storm beaches to barely touched stretches of white and golden sand.

Today I wanted to get onto the bit of wild coast at Skeld, just a few kilometres around to the west from Burra. There’s a farm at Scarbister (photo above), just out of Easter Skeld village, that I started from, though the actual route wasn’t initially clear. Land ownership on Shetland is either croft land, farmland or open hill, and it’s not always easy to tell which is which. There’s lambs around at the moment, but Roja sees them quicker than I do, and knows to stay within a leash length from me. My suspicion today was that the cliff pasture was open hill, but there are so few people hiking that if those who do have respect for the land and the grazing animals, I don’t think anyone is bothered.

Some rain was due today, a front coming quickly across at lunchtime-ish, but we managed just about, to beat it. It was more up and down than usual, and the cliffs a bit higher, but that made for a more spectacular outing. In all, it was about 6 miles, out for about two and a half hours.

After lunch I drove to the slightly bigger village of Walls, where there is a shop (photo below). This will be the last chance for a shop for me until next Wednesday, but really it was only bread I needed. It so happened to coincide with the end of school, and the shop was about as busy as it gets (maybe 10 people) with children celebrating the end of the school year. Those ten or so memorable years as a schoolboy, then another 30 odd as a teacher, that last day of the summer term is something well worth celebrating… Arguably more for the teacher than for the children, but as a youngster the 6 to 8 weeks seem as lot longer than they do as a teacher.

I had half a mind to stay around Walls, but decided against it, and headed about 10 miles across the west peninsula of Mainland to Sandness and Melby to a couple of north facing beaches that would be a bit sheltered, as there is a day of rain forecast tomorrow. It’s a Friday as well, so as ever, I was keen for a decent 4G signal to watch some sport, especially with a rain day tomorrow. It was the T20 Roses match this evening, though the Manchester weather put paid to that, so I flicked between 3 or 4 matches on YouTube.

I’m stopped for a couple of nights on Melby beach. It’s a great place, though does have quite a few flies from the seaweed rotting above the tideline, an excuse to get out the new fly net for the door. It’s a hack I picked up from the internet, a less technological net that adheres with Velcro, and it has a magnetic strip down the middle to provide access. By chance, the largest size I could find, 150 x 200 cms, fits my door perfectly. The good news is that it works very well. It will be a more difficult test with midges though, as they seem to find a way around edges and through any gap, but it kept these bothersome flies out, so at £25, a result..