500km - The Great Tour of Shetland

Ride overview

Single track roads, a coastal landscape to rival any in the world, some amazing sea life, including whales, orcas and puffins, ferries, great hotels, DI Jimmy Perez, sheep, and often wild weather, together must surely be enough to tempt any thrill seeking adventurer to this northern outpost of Great Britain. The Shetland Isles are nearer the Arctic Circle than London, and Shetlanders tend to look more to Norway for their cultural references than anything the UK might offer. Indeed, they are a relatively late addition to the British Isles’ portfolio; they were part of Princess Margaret of Denmark’s dowry when she was brought over in 1469 to marry Jame s III. The isles are very much an adventure destination; the weather can be more violent than anything you may ever have experienced, re-supply points (shops) are few and far between, pubs even rarer, and should you have a mechanical, help is hard to find. All of which of course, makes Shetland the ideal adventure destination.

Jarlshof

Burrastow House (Hotel)

Eshaness

Ride practicalities
Using the mapping App for Shetland seems to send it into a spin. It has created Himalayan styled mountains to cross. Be assured, they do not exist, although the isles are gently rolling.
The route as posted can be shortened by over 100km if you were to miss out the ‘there and back’ trips to various peninsulas.
START/FINISH: Lerwick DISTANCE: 500km TOTAL ASCENT:2500 (est.) TERRAIN AND SURFACES: some busy roads around Lerwick and Sumburgh, otherwise it’s quiet single-track. Shetland hast the best road surfaces in UK RECOMMENDED CAFÈS/PUBS/ACCOMMODATION: The Baltasoud Hotel, Busta; Busta House Hotel, Sumbrugh; The old lighthouse NEARBY MAINLINE TRAIN SERVICES: There are no trains. Check ferry times to Aberdeen here PLACES TO VISIT; Lerwick; Shetland Museum and Archive Haroldswick~The Skidbladner (Viking Ship), Tangwick; The Tangwick Haa museum. Sumburgh; Jarshof, Sumburgh Lighthouse, Dunrossness; Crofter’s Cottage Museum at Dunrossness LINKS TO OTHER RIDES: NSCR Orkney, NSCR stage 24

Things to consider and plan for;
Bring spares - tubes etc- as there are only a couple of bike shops and both are in Lerwik
Refuel at every village store - they are few and far between
Sheep are apt to wander across your path at will - they seem to take delight in doing so just when you have a nice long downhill section
The islands are windy. Often very windy. Learn to love the Atlantic gales. There’ll be times when the best choice is to go for a walk rather than ride
Leave plenty of time for the trip. There’ll be days when it is impossible to ride.
Keep your phone charged in case of any emergencies
Wild camping is legal in Scotland. There are many exceptionally beautiful beaches on which to put your tent.

Ride the Route

Ride notes
The ferry from Orkney arrives at dawn. The boat may have played pitch and toss with the waves during the passage and depending on how queasy you feel, you may choose to recover in Lerwick for a night or two. Once ready to ride, head north. The roads around Lerwick are busier than you may have anticipated, but the traffic soon diminishes to little more than sheep idly wandering across the road. Soon you’re on a lonely single track road to Gott and Wadbister and riding past a succession of bays and headlands. You’ll meet Trowies too.

Trowies are mischievous trolls who live in a trow or low mound. They are small and ugly, and often nocturnal, but that is not to say they appear in lonely places during daylight hours. They are said to love music, so if you are foolish enough to be playing tunes from a speaker as you ride, you should expect a trowie to appear and lure you to its den.

As you ride you’ll notice many a windmill on the hills. As North Sea Oil runs out, the Shetlanders are turning their generating expertise to harnessing the power of nature. The windfarms provide electricity for over 500,000 homes.

The brown peaty hills rise and fall, and although Shetland is not mountainous, the hills rarely leave you alone. They are not steep, but mischievous in that they have a sapping gradient. The landscape is treeless and wind-blown. There is no shelter from the wind, nor from any squall. The sea is ever present, light ever changing. Clouds sprint across the sky up here, the sun appears for a few minutes, followed by heavy rain. You can expect four seasons in an hour.

After 50km of peatland and sea and sheep, you arrive at your first ferry, at Toft, which will take you across to Yell. Whilst waiting, be sure to use the little cafe by the jetty. You’ll need fortifying for the next leg.

It’d be true to say that after 50km, you’ll be settled into the scenery. It’ll change very little over the next 450 kilometres. That said, the play of light, the wind whipping up the sea into a frothy foam, the deep calm blue of the voes, and the odd lonely croft, or pony makes the ride always interesting. As does staying on your bike when it’s windy. Play games such as trying to ride in a straight line on a gusty day. Talk to the sheep. They’ll want to know where you’ve come from. There are a lot of sheep, twelve sheep for each islander, which makes the islands second in the world for sheep to people ratio. In first place are The Falkland Islands, who have 242 sheep for every person. Most of the sheep you’ll see are Shetlands, smaller, darker and hardier breed than those down south. They are descended from the Soay sheep brought over by Neolithic farmers 4,500 years ago.

As well as Trowies and sheep, there is another hazard to be aware of; The White Wife. There are various legends about the white clothed lady who patrols Yells’ roads. One is that she was married to a terrible and abusive man. After years of torment she ended her life in the Loch of Watlee. However, she is full of remorse for having left her son behind and she’ll patrol the roads hoping for a lift ack home in order to make amends with him. She likes red cars apparently.

After a traversing across Yell, you take another ferry to the island of Unst, the original Treasure Island. Those familiar with Robert Louis Stevenson’s eponymous book will know the island’s shape, as Stevenson used it as a template for his island. Baltasound is the ‘capital’ of Unst and has the island’s only hotel. The town was once an important herring port with links to the Hanseatic League.

There’s a Viking Longhouse as well as a Longship at Haroldswick (which was built with the intention of sailing from Norway to Canada at the end of the last century, but it only reached as far as Haroldswick). A nearby gin distillery offer tours. At Haroldswick you will have choice - to head towards Skaw the northernmost road in the UK, or to Hermaness on a track to see Bitish Isles’ most northern point at Muckle Fugga. Really there is no choice; do both.

After a night or two in the Baltasound Hotel, head back across the heather moors of Unst. At Mid-Yell, turn down the west coast to West Sandwich and Clothan. The road gently rises and falls. The sea is rarely out of view. What is out of view, are several species of rare Arctic-Alpine plants. On this huge planet, some plants have chosen only this island on which to live; Edmondston's Chickweed is one such species.

Having taken the ferry from Flukes Hole back to the Mainland, you ride past Sullom Voe Oil Terminal. The complex recieved its first drops of North Sea Oil via a pipeline on 25 November 1978 and it has been processing and shipping North Sea Oil ever since. Much of the ‘black gold’ is exported in tankers, which must keep their engines running whilst they are docked so that they are in a state of readiness at all times for vacating the Terminal should they need to at short notice. At its height of production in the late 1990s and early 200s, the terminal was handling almost 8 billion barrels (abt 1.1 billion metric tons) a year. Riding past the huge tanks linked by a maze of pipes is a weird experience, for here is one of the key industrial places in the whole of the British Isles, yet nothing seems to be happening; there’s no noise, no great too-ing and fro-ing, no great jets of steam nor smoke, an absence of trucks. Instead, there’s a silent collection of grey-white tanks linked by a maze of pipes. surrounded by sea and moor.

Continuing south, the route follows the deep inlet of Sullom Voe past the small settlement of Graven, which was a base for RAF flying boats in the last war. At Brae, it would be foolish not to the road to Eshaness and Tangwick. There are a couple of accommodation options, including the lighthouse cottages.

Not only are there cliffs and spectacular inlets but there’s also The Hols o' Scraada, a partially collapsed sea cave through which waves roll down a subterranean passage to break on the beach 150 metres inland.

Ride onwards and southwards, through Twatt and onto Walls. This is another diversion and worthy of your time. Burrastow House, is one of the most comfortable and reasonable places you could imagine staying in. Take a couple of days rest from the bike. Walk along the voes and around the coastline watching the unique sea-weed eating sheep.

Continuing south, the route continues through various small settlements including Voe and Aith and Bixter. At Scalloway, another peninsula calls for at its end, there is one of the most spectacular beaches in the UK. Pristine white sand, a jade coloured sea, and if you’re lucky a deep blue sky. Marina’s Kitchen Cabinet could well be open to feed you too.

Back on the mainland, ride to Bigton, where you arrive at St Ninian’s Beach, another stupendous place, where the sea arrives from two different directions.

At Sumburgh, on the southernmost tip of the Mainland, there’s an airport and one of the great treasures of northern Europe; Jarlshof. For more than 4,000 years, humans have lived on this site. Neolithic people first settled here around 2700 BC, and it remained in use until the AD 1600s, making it one of the longest inhabited places on earth.

The road finally runs out at Sumburgh Head, where there’s another lighthouse designed by Robert Stevenson, (adding to his extensive Shetland collection). The views, and atmosphere at Sumburgh Head can vary from hour to hour. Storms and sunlight mix in a heady concoction of North Sea antics. An option is to stay in the old lighthouse keeper’s cottage.

The ride north to Lerwick will be as different in light and weather as it could possibly be from your ride southwards on the same road. If you rode down through an Atlantic tempest, you may well return in glorious sunshine with the sea as smooth as the proverbial millpond. You might choose to stop at the Crofter’s Cottage Museum at Dunrossness, with its garden and atmospheric interior; dark and very basic with the smell of a peat fire in the grate.

Prepare yourself as you approach Lerwick, for there’ll be traffic and people, both unusual sites on this Great Tour of Shetland. Eat well at No. 88 before wandering the streets and wynds in the expectation of bumping into the troubled DI Perez. There’s a fabulous museum too. And once aboard the ferry, you’ll wistfully look across the Sound at the end of the world that was the Shetland Isles.

Every route on this website has been carefully researched as well as ridden. However situations on the ground can change quickly. If you know of changes to this route, or cafes, pubs and the like which you think other cyclists need to know about, feel free to share your thoughts below.

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