Tag: Hermaness

Friday Flickr – Puffins Galore

Puffins have got to be cutest birds ever. I can spend hours sitting and watching them.

For this week’s Friday Flickr I’ve decided to go with a theme rather than a place.

And for my first theme, I’ve chosen puffins.

Puffins have got to be the cutest birds. With their colourful beaks and soulful eyes, to say nothing of their clumsy gaits and comical crash landings, how can anyone not love a puffin?

The best place I’ve found to see puffins is Shetland. There are two huge colonies; one right at the bottom of the islands at Sumburgh and the other right at the top at Hermaness on Unst (my favourite island).

Sumburgh is the easiest to get to as it’s on the Shetland Mainland (main island) and is easily drivable from Lerwick. You can even get a bus if you don’t have a car. I say easiest to get to, but it still involves getting to Aberdeen and then a 12-14 hour ferry journey before you even get to Lerwick.

Unst is a little trickier (but so worth it), as from Lerwick you have to drive to the top of the Mainland, get a 20-30 minute ferry over to the island of Yell, drive for 30-40 minutes to the top of Yell, get another ferry for 10-15 minutes over to Unst, drive as far as you can to Hermaness at the top of Unst (half an hour or so), then walk across the boggy moorland for around an hour (dodging skua attacks) to get to the most northerly bit of coast in Britain.

Looking out from cliffs there are a couple of bits of rock that belong to Britain (Muckle Flugga and Out Stack), but that’s it. No more land. You’d have to keep going until you reached Antarctica before you  hit land again.

Hermaness is well worth the effort of getting there. Not only do you get to see Muckle Flugga lighthouse (of Shipping Forecast fame), have the overwhelming sense of being on top of the world and sit among hundreds of puffins, but you get to experience a ginormous gannetry.

Puffins might be the cutest birds, but gannets are my all time favourites. They’re just so sleek and skillful as well as stunningly beautiful to look at.

The gannetry is a massive assault on the senses – the sheer number of birds, the sound, the smell – about the only sense not being assaulted is taste, though I’m sure that could be fixed just by breathing in through your mouth.

But back to puffins. Sit on the grass on the cliffs at either Sumburgh or Hermaness and you will have puffins pop up out of their burrows and crash land on the grass all around you.

They spend most of the year at sea and only come back to land when they breed. This means there’s quite a limited season to see them. They start arriving around April and have pretty much disappeared by early August.

I can sit for hours just watching them or snapping away trying to get the perfect photo. The photograph I really want to take is of a puffin with a mouth full of sandeels, but so far I’ve never managed this.

So I have a reason to keep going back. Not that I need one.

Click on the image below to access the Flickr album.

Puffins

 

Unst

Gannets, puffins, a lighthouse called Muckle Flugga, a chocolate factory and a brewery: just some of the reasons why Unst is my favourite island.

Sunday 14/8/11
hostel at Uyeasound
The hostel at Uyeasound in Unst.

Unst is one of my favourite places in the world. You can’t get any further north in the UK. There are a couple of rocks further north (Muckle Flugga and Out Stack), but this is the last place that can actually be called a place. Last time I was here, I found it difficult to tear myself away and spent about half of my time on Shetland here. This time I’ve left it till last so I had something to look forward to and so I did get to see other places too.

I’ve been here a couple of days already. The first day was spent doing admin-y type things – finding internet access to book my train tickets for the Great Glen Way (GGW), sending emails, getting petrol, doing a stock-take of my food and working out what I needed to buy for the GGW, and so on.
Yesterday was really stormy. Force 7 winds and rain lashing down until the evening. No-one could really go anywhere, including all the canoeists who are up here for the weekend. We all sat around the hostel watching the waves crash against the shoreline and the tents flap madly in the wind. Once again my little Vango survived brilliantly. There was a similar storm when I was here last year and other people’s much more expensive tents were tearing and had poles snapping. Mine flaps away, but survives without the tiniest shred of a tear or hairline crack of a pole.
Uyeasound after the storm
Calm after the storm.
This morning was beautiful. As predicted, the storm had blown itself out. After breakfast I drove out to Hermaness. This is a nature reserve at the end of the end of the UK. There is a car parking area and a small visitor centre with toilets. This area is known for its birds as well its dramatic views. Because of the birds visitors are requested to stay on the paths and not wander freely across the moorland tops. As it is very, very  boggy it’s much easier to stay on the paths anyway.
I walked about 30 minutes uphill and then across moorland to the cliffs. Once at the cliffs most people head east to see the puffin colony and Muckle Flugga with its lighthouse. As I like to be a bit contrary I walked west. Just a few minutes to the west, where hardly anyone goes, is the most amazing gannetry (gannet colony). I discovered this last year and wanted to go back this year. The dark cliffs look white, they are that stuffed with gannets. The air is full of gannets; the sea is full of bobbing gannets. The noise, the smell, is just pure gannet. Most of my senses felt completely overwhelmed by it. 
gannetry at Hermaness
The gannetry at Hermaness
Only after having my fill of gannets did I walk east. I didn’t see any puffins this year, though I’d probably only just missed them. Last year, I was here a few days earlier and there were puffins everywhere. I’d sat for ages with puffins popping up out of the ground or zooming in to land all around me.
Hermaness and Muckle Flugga
Hermaness with Muckle Flugga in the distance.

I walked further east along the cliffs until I was level with Muckle Flugga. I have to learn to kayak properly so I can actually get there. There were a dozen canoeists on the water today and I watched for a while to see if they would go to Muckle Flugga, but they just seemed to be sticking to the coast.

Leaving the cliffs I headed up and across the moors again on another path that joined with the original path to drop down to the car park.
I finished my day out by going to the chocolate factory for a deluxe experience. A hot chocolate with whipped cream, marshmallows and a chocolate lattice; three Abernathy biscuits partly dipped in dark, milk and white chocolate; two filled chocolates, one dark and one white; and three squares of solid milk, dark and white chocolate. How ideal is this island? It’s isolated, friendly, relaxing, has great wildlife and views AND has its own brewery and chocolate factory. Can you see why it’s one of my favourite places?

Muckle Flugga

My obsession with Muckle Flugga.

I’ve just been catching up on Alastair Humphreys’ blog and see he cycled the length of Shetland recently and finished up by camping at Hermaness on the north coast of Unst. Unst is the most northerly island in Britain (not counting 2 lumps of rock, one of which is Muckle Flugga).

I found myself there last summer – I actually should have been in Iran, but that’s a whole other story – and fulfilled (kind of) an ambition by seeing Muckle Flugga. I’ve always been fascinated with it ever since I first heard the name on the shipping forecast. It’s basically a rock with a now un-manned lighthouse on it. But it’s a far away rock with a funny sounding name and those are two things that always appeal to me. I liked it so much when I finally saw it that I ended up seeing it three times.

The first was when I walked along the Hermaness cliffs which are fascinating enough in themselves because of their huge gannet colony and puffins. Then I went on a boat trip around Muckle Flugga and got a close up view of it. On my last day in Unst I climbed up Saxa Vord which has a military radar station sat on its top.

I felt very intrepid as I ignored signs warning me of snow and ice. I felt very adventurous as I next ignored signs warning me that I would be arrested under the official secrets act if I went any further. I felt very heroic as I ignored signs at the top that warned me I would be irradiated if I got any closer. (I’d actually been told by locals that it was fine to ignore the signs and everyone does). I’d gone up partly because I wanted to have the experience of ignoring all those signs and partly because it has great views of Muckle Flugga. At the top I ran into the guard who goes up once a day to check on the place. He didn’t arrest me, just told me where to go to get the best views and advised me not to get too close to the radar bits that really do have radiation in them.

So I’ve seen plenty of Muckle Flugga and that should have been that ambition fulfilled. But at the hostel I met a few kayakers, two of whom had actually paddled out to the rock, landed and climbed up to the lighthouse. This is not allowed but, as I found with Saxa Vord, no-one seems to bother with things like ‘not being allowed’ in Unst. I was jealous and so decided that I have to learn to kayak so I can also land on Muckle Flugga. The sea is pretty rough so it’s not just a case of learning the basics and going for it – I also have to get good at it. But this is why I have learning to canoe/kayak on my list of things to do.

I’m going to go back to Shetland this summer after I have walked the Great Glen Way. I’ll go back to Unst and gaze at Muckle Flugga from afar again. As I’ve done nothing about learning to kayak this year that will be the most I can do. But one year I will definitely paddle to it, climb the steps and touch those lighthouse walls.