A Magical Journey To Unst, Shetland
Finding A Place In My Recently Discovered Ancestral Homeland
I finally reached Unst last week, after more than two years of planning and waiting out the pandemic, with the help of a college friend who is adept at driving stick shift on the left, as well as navigating the one-lane roads that predominate in Shetland. It took us two days to get there—and that was just from mainland Scotland. Day 1: driving to Edinburgh, taking a two-hour flight and staying overnight in Lerwick—the capital of the Shetlands, population 7,000. Day 2: driving up the Mainland (main Shetland island) and taking a ferry to Yell, then driving north to catch the ferry to Unst. All of this—three islands, two ferries—took three pleasant hours. Suddenly we were there.
I had never been to Unst before, yet I felt strangely and immediately at home. As those who’ve read my previous article (“Discovering My Shetland Roots, and ‘Shetland’”—July 12, 2021) know, no one in my family knew about the Shetland connection until last year, when a cousin in England discovered that my father’s paternal grandfather, Andrew Anderson, assumed to have been an Edinburgh native, was from Unst. This is far more than a geographic difference. Shetlanders aren’t Celtic but Norse, descended from Vikings. Their culture has no clans, no bagpipes and no Gaelic. Discovering that we were Shetland Andersons meant that the tartan we had always worn was bogus; it also explained my father’s large amount of Scandinavian DNA.
I already knew that Shetland was full of Andersons—it’s the sixth most common name there—but I was unprepared for its ubiquity. Even in Lerwick my name appeared on shops and street signs. Even more striking was the response it sparked: people reacted warmly whenever I gave my name. The idea that I might be an Anderson from mainland Scotland—a Celt—seemed not to occur to them.
Only six hundred people live on Unst today. Based on the sample I met, I’m related to three-fourths of them, a dream come true for someone with no first cousins. At the Unst Heritage Center, I traded information about my great-grandfather with a staff member from Burrafirth, my great-grandfather’s hamlet. At the end of our conference, she confirmed that we were fourth cousins.
My four days on Unst were revelatory in other ways. Although I was born in and brought up in cities, I loved its rural atmosphere. There were few cars and almost no people except in the two stores where we bought groceries (including Anderson meat). Our nearest neighbors were a flock of friendly sheep. To the extent that we saw people they were friendly too, striking up conversations when they might have treated us with suspicion. On the roads everyone waved to us, and we waved back.
On Sunday we drove up to Burrafirth. Apart from a couple of farms and a few houses, the area is a nature preserve. We hiked up the green hills above the firth and gazed at the loch behind it. We passed grazing sheep and flowering heather. The beach below was white sand; the water azure. The sky was a slightly lighter blue, streaked with clouds. There was something tropical about the scene, despite its location on the North Sea. Most of all, it was pristine, the most unspoilt place I have ever seen. The land around the firth is privately owned and fenced, and no one can reach the beach.
In the hills we passed the ruins of old crofts, some with walls still standing and others reduced to piles of stones. Andrew grew up in one of them but left for Edinburgh as soon as he could, probably in his late teens. By 1872 he was married to my great-grandmother Jane Summers, a co-worker at the warehouse he would eventually manage. Andrew’s widowed mother Margaret made the move soon afterwards, becoming the last of my direct family to leave Unst.
I love this piece, Hope! It sounds so beautiful, and welcoming, and so Anderson. :) What a wonderful discovery. I'm so glad you were able to make this trip to a new homeland. Safe travels and I hope you can make it back someday for perhaps an extended stay - sounds like a lovely place to hole up and write.
I feel like I was there as well!