Shetland has over 100 islands and when I planned our itinerary I booked time on each of the major ones so that we could see a good portion of the islands in one trip.
I’ve included a map below so you can see that we’re on Yell, the second biggest island next to the mainland, and one of the three most northerly.
We didn’t have anything officially planned for Yell, so we spent the night prior looking at our guidebooks and tourist materials.
We decided on a hike across the peat and heath to the Eigg and with views of a fjord on one side and the Atlantic on the other.
So in the morning we drove north until I misdirected D. to try and find the one shop in Ulsta and ended up on a dirt lane next to a house that also was the post office?
After that D. very much wanted a good cup of coffee so we drove past the road to our trail and into the town of Mid-Yell. It was a sunny small village on a bay and there was a regatta going on at the pier.
We found a restaurant called LJ’s and while D. went in for an Americano I petted this adorable creature on the fence outside. We have seen a few cats on our trip and it always feels a bit like Cocoa and Peaches are saying hello when we do.
Dawn has been sending us photos so we know they are doing well, but it was fun to meet this tabby too!
After coffee we headed to Aywick to see if we could get D. another wool hat since his was a bit stretched out. The Aywick Shop was full of food and this and that. It’s a lot like a small town general store in Montana.
The owner took D. back to look at hats but none were wool. She told him she could have someone knit one for him overnight! I laughed so hard thinking about some poor woman knitting furiously to get D. a new hat. But anyway, D. declined since she told him she thought he could find one on Unst tomorrow.
We returned to the road until we found the start of the walk we wanted to do, which was basically at the bottom of a very large moorland hill between two sheep farms.
It was just us. No trails. A map and a compass. We walked for miles over spongy, bumpy peat getting some nice views but probably nowhere near the intended path in the guidebook.
The weather was mostly sunny, with some wind, and we stopped to have mid afternoon lunch next to a large patch of quartz.
We returned the same way we came and feeling tired from a nearly 10 mile hike around unstable spongy ground went straight back home for dinner.
