May 2020
On 2nd May, I was supposed to be making my first visit to Shetland – by train and ferry, from capital to capital, via Aberdeen. However, with the restrictions on travel and interpersonal contact imposed as a result of Covid-19 virus still in place in the UK, I could not go until the lockdown had been lifted. My visit was to be virtual.
From Leith to Lerwick
During my initial research, I discovered that when, in 1836, the Aberdeen, Leith and Clyde Shipping Company extended a route from Leith Docks in Edinburgh to Lerwick, Shetlanders started using it to trade wool, lace and knitted items for the markets down south. I have lived in or very close to Leith for many years and this started me thinking. Perhaps I could also make a return trip, but in reverse, from Leith to Lerwick and back. Maybe I would find out what it was and is like to cross 216 miles of the North Sea. I’m guessing it might have been a real culture shock, coming from a rural crofting community to a noisy city, and remembered how hard the lads from the Fife farming community found it when they started dance college in London at the same time I did. Some of them simply returned home within the first term.
I have thought a great deal about home and belonging over the years. I am English, born a ‘Kentish Maiden (KM)’ south of London. (It depends which side of the River Medway you were born as to whether you are a KM or a ‘Maid of Kent’). Also referred to as the ‘Garden of England’, Kent is where I was staying during the first 5 months of the pandemic lockdown when I made this Shetland project. My history is that I left Kent when I was 18 years old, spent some time in other parts of England and Wales in my 20s, and then moved to Edinburgh, where I have lived for 35+ years. In 2016, I began a new phase: I travelled to and around Europe for six months of each year, and spent the other six at home. When I am away, I feel comfortable, not homesick. It is my and others’ relationship to their homeland that I want to try and understand more through this virtual trip to Shetland.
Walking and talking with women about home
I was hoping to invite women to walk with me when I visited, to talk about their home on Shetland, as well as what it is like to leave, live elsewhere, and then return. I am interested in what brings about a sense of belonging. The act of walking is one which can ground us, ease the flow of conversation, and connect with what can be called ‘home’, the earth. Now that the plan has been changed, I will be on my home turf speaking on the phone to women walking on theirs, and I am looking forward to a fruitful chat about the subject.
While I cannot go in person, I can identify some benefits in making an imaginery journey. As an inveterate walker, I had planned to explore as much of the mainland as possible on foot. I knew I would start in Lerwick for practical reasons, but from there it would depend on invitations received and what turned up. I would have been alive to what caught my interest. Now that I will be travelling virtually and ‘meeting’ folk on the phone or Zoom, I can zip backwards and forwards from Bressay in the east to Papa Stour in the west, from Unst in the north to Sumburgh on the southern tip, without having to worry about ferry or bus connections. Although I would prefer to smell the real scents of the Loch of Spiggie, or hear the actual squawks of the skua (recorded here by Nikolay Terentyev on Soundcloud), it will definitely be quicker to get around!
Here is Christine De Luca speaking in Shetlandic, the dialect of the archipelago, sometimes called auld or broad Shetland / Shaetlan. Recorded by Wikitongues.
‘I wis boarn and bred in Shetland an maist o mi childhood wis spent in Waas….. – it means ‘Inlets o da sea’, an hit hed a fundamental effect on me, bein browt up in a croftin/ fishin community aa mi childhood. Whin I cam awa tae Edinburgh whaar I bide noo, an I’ve bidden for 50 year, hit wis redder awe-inspirin an scary.’
Direct from Christine De Luca, recorded by Wikitongues
I recently lead a walk in Leith focused on some of the women who lived there in the past (Walking Between Worlds). In research for that project, I was unable to find much information about women from Shetland who might be buried in Edinburgh, so I am on the look-out for stories about the women from these far-flung northern Isles who visited and traded with the mainland, for accounts of the sea trip (the route has been discontinued), or people who have passed-down tales from friends and relations. Please do get in touch if you have any information.
Aims of my Shetland Project
- To get a female perspective of the Isles – now and in the past
- To look at the topic of ‘home’: leaving home, returning, living and working there and away, in general
- To start to understand a particularly female viewpoint of home and belonging, specifically the northernmost islands which have a chequered relationship with Scotland and Scandinavia.
Thanks to Isobel Cockburn for the title photo of a loom in the Textiles Museum, Lerwick.
Links
Leith to Lerwick Days 1 and 2 Charting my journey northwards and visiting Lerwick’s Textile Museum and Museum and Archives.
Home, Belonging and a Sense of Identity
Lerwick and Northmavine Days 3 and 4, in which I write about the Press Gang, visit The Old Tolbooth and view Da Lightsome Buoy, then travel to the north west to speak to Helen Robertson about her knitting projects.
Whalsay and Bressay About Sunday Teas, these 2 smaller islands, and about home and a sense of belonging.
Wildie and Lalla, An elegiac film by Catriona Macdonald, Shona Main and Angelica Kroger.
Walking without a donkey 