Life on the Edge: 16th-Century Shetland's Harsh and Beautiful Landscape

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On a clear day at Hermaness Head on Unst, Shetland’s northernmost isle, the landscape is elemental: the dark Atlantic, green fields, and boundless heather moors.^[1] These islands, closer to Bergen than to Edinburgh, feel far removed from the Scottish mainland. In fact, modern surveys note that “the majority of the interior and upland parts of Shetland are covered by expansive areas of peatland”,^[2] leaving only a narrow coastal fringe for habitation and cultivation. Everywhere else, crofts cluster in sheltered clefts or inlets, and what can’t be farmed is left as common rough pasture. For scale, the archipelago’s high ground is low: Shetland’s summit, Ronas Hill (450 m), is modest,^[3] and Orkney’s peak, Ward Hill (481 m on Hoy), is barely higher.^[4] In effect, the isles’ “hills” are more like moors that people occasionally scramble. This absence of any mountain forest (1500s Shetland had no native woods at all) means the weather’s brutality is uninterrupted.

Section Index:

Of Kings and Jarls
Heather, Cattle, Croft
Pomona: Orkney’s Fields
The Old Country and the Old Tales
Weathering Time

Even today, the contrast between sea and land is vivid. One field researcher remarked: “around every corner in Shetland… the dark blue sea [stood] contrasting with the greys and browns of the rocks and moors”.^[5] Picture green grass fields flanked by grey boulders and purple heath, under a big sky. In summer, rainbows often appear over newly burned heather. In winter, mica-shining cliffs and the sparse fluff of snow replace color. In sum, Shetland’s very geology has ensured this vision: tough schist and gneiss give only thin soils, and the Atlantic delivers wind, rain and fish^[6] together they forge the tapestry of crofts ringed by heath.

Life here meant adapting to wind more than snow. Traditional Shetland houses, low stone longhouses with turf roofs, had few windows and no chimney; smoke simply filtered through the thatch. In winter families huddled around peat fires, their woolen plaids heavy with damp. Even children went barefoot indoors, their feet toughened by the cold stone floors. Houses were sunk slightly into the earth for stability, with only short gabled ends facing the prevailing gale.

Even fences and fields reflected this exposure. Dry-stone walls were only about knee-high, enough to pen sheep, but useless against a gale. There were no hedges or woodlands to shelter the crofts. Farmers spoke of weather first: when clouds built up, they hurried to cover hay or bring flocks in, knowing a squall could arrive within minutes.

For more information on The Beast of the Moors check out the production’s official page.

Of Kings and Jarls

By 1500, Shetland’s governance was a patchwork of old and new. Decades after the 1472 pawn, the isles still lived by many Norse traditions. Land was held under udal (allodial) tenure, not feudal tenure, and in 1567 the Scottish Parliament even “recognis[ed] the ancient native laws in the islands”.^[7] In other words, a crofter could claim his hill by blood right, as in Viking times. At the same time, Scottish kings and their appointees imposed courts and taxes. Islanders often found themselves under lords who were new to their ways.

By the mid-16th century new overlords made life harder. Robert Stewart, Earl of Orkney (illegitimate son of King James V), treated Shetland as his personal fiefdom. He placed sheriffs in every parish who let nothing pass, wool, fish or grain, without a fee. Islanders later recorded the exactions: they “exact 3000 head of cattle, 5000 bolls of grain, 6280 stones of butter, and 700 gallons of oil… each year” from Orkney and Zetland.^[8] Whether the figures are literal or polemic, they convey the strain of tribute. People sometimes fled to the moors rather than pay or serve.

Religion and law were intertwined. The Bishopric of Orkney (based in Kirkwall) nominally covered Shetland, but in 1537 the last Norwegian bishop relinquished his rights. The Scottish Crown then sold much church land to nobles, shrinking the Church’s role. By the late 1500s, Protestant ministers arrived, but villagers clung to old customs underground. Shrine-visits to Our Lady’s Chapel at Ronas or pilgrim stones were still remembered. For example, one record complains that Shetlanders in 1600 would make the journey to an abandoned chapel for healings, long after an act forbade Catholic worship.

Heather, Cattle, Croft

So what grew on these slopes and in these dales? Agriculture in 16th-century Shetland was minimal and communal. Islanders sowed only short-season grains: spring barley and oats (the hardy local bere barley in particular).^[9] In fact, that bere barley survives today as a specialty crop in the Northern Isles, a living heirloom of medieval farming. A crofter’s infield might yield only enough bere for daily porridge and oat bannocks, and a little malt for ale. Potatoes and maize lay centuries ahead. People often added peas or kale behind a stone wall, but garden plots were exceedingly small. Winter stores came from lowland hayfields and from salted or dried fish kept in stone cellars.

Much of the land was never plowed at all. Modern ecologists note that Orkney’s hills, and by extension Shetland’s, are “dominated by heather, grasses and sedges”.^[10] In practice, that meant sheep grazing on most hillsides. Every summer, flocks were driven onto the common stova (summer pasture) to fatten on wind-twisted heath. The upland moor, left unworked, still held tufts of rush and ling that sheep grazed. Farmers knew every hummock: if sheep found a sweet grass tuft, it would be replanted lower in a field.

Where crofters did till, they often did so by hacking heather turf. A 19th-century Orkney account reports one farm of 400 acres “of which no less than 300 have been broken in from heather, to be… part arable”.^[11] In other words, generations had continuously spaded peat to make soil. By 1500, most of the best soil was already in use. Shallow fields ringed each village, their dry-stone dykes sagging over time but still marking arable from pasturage. The typical croft held only a few acres; much of the rough grazing was common ground.

Even so, diets were frugal. With no potatoes or maize, daily meals meant little else but grains and dairy. A peck of bere might feed a family a week, and butter or cheese each evening. Women churned milk into lumps of cheese (crowdie) and salted butter barrels for winter. Fish preserved in brine, wrasse, and dried eel-skin might be swapped for oats from Orkney traders. On good summer days, fields of barley fermented their malt scents in the air. Tools were simple: wooden ploughs (drawn by horse or ox), sickles, and querns to grind grain.

Don’t forget to check out “The Beast of the Moors” Behind The Screenplay page for more information on the writing inspiration and process.

Pomona: Orkney’s Fields

Across the Pentland Firth, Orkney’s landscape was only slightly gentler. Mainland Orkney has broader loams and more arable ground (hence the old nickname Pomona for its fertility), but its high ground remained heather and peat. As one NatureScot report notes, Orkney’s uplands are “characterised by heather moorland cover which contrasts with the pastoral greens of the lower ground”.^[12] In practice, that meant larger cereal fields on the lowlands (especially around Kirkwall and Birsay) and more intensive haymaking. A peasant in Holm parish might cut two flushes of grass a year. Grain could be stacked in greater volume: by the 1600s Orkney would export butter and meal abroad, though at mid-century each home still grew barely enough barley to brew beer for home use.

Yet Orkney was far from park-like. The same peat that caked Shetland underlay Orkney’s hills. Even on Mainland, hoary moss and frequent bog remained. Observers later noted Hoy’s cliffs and Rousay’s ridges whipped by salt gales and snow. One mid-century ballad (sung in both Isles) contrasts Orkney’s “fragrant hay” fields with Shetland’s wind-blown heather, implying Orkney was “little England” by comparison. It wasn’t quite so; seagulls nested on Orkney’s grassy braes just as on Unst’s cliffs.

The Old Country and the Old Tales

The human story of these isles is inseparable from their terrain. The famous Orkneyinga Saga (c.1200) explicitly bills itself as “the narrative of the history of the Orkney and Shetland islands”^[13], a reminder that a single Norse polity once held both archipelagos. By 1500 the saga was old reading, but its influence lingered. Islanders still lived by Norse law and spoke its dialect in farmhouses, even as Scottish sheriffs collected taxes. Visitors would have heard Norn (a North Germanic tongue) far more often than Gaelic. Each croft family preserved surnames and customs more Scandinavian than Celt.

Folklore was baked into the landscape too. Many 16th-century Shetland ballads (recorded much later) are shot through with place-names: verses might mention “a spring on Unst” or “the crag of Saxa Vord,” indicating that a single hillside could be a protagonist. Fishermen sang chants of seals and waves that echoed their sea-haunted lives. Even Christian rites mixed with these old beliefs.

Centuries later, writers would wander those same moors for inspiration. Hugo Lunny’s recent novel The Beast of the Moors (2023) literally transports readers “to the enchanting Shetland Islands” and even locates its mythical Wulver on those very wastes.^[14] Though a fantasy, it underscores the persistent mood of the land: the lonely Heather Hills are still “shrouded in local folklore,” as its back cover promises. Likewise, the BBC’s modern Shetland series treats the landscape as a central character. A television travel writer quips that “Shetland’s landscape is arguably the main character” of the show.^[15]

Weathering Time

Weather above these latitudes meant few safe seasons. Even a single night of frost in June could kill an entire stand of barley ready for harvest, a risk the islanders always faced. Conversely, summer evenings stretched into a long glow well past 10pm, allowing extra hours for outdoor chores. Life was calibrated by these extremes: months of near-endless daylight in midsummer, and full darkness in midwinter, when the moors lay white with frost and snow.

In the end, the evidence is in the earth. The 16th century left no great castle here; the noble seats, whether an earl’s hall or kirk, were modest by Continental standards. Instead, every croft wall and sheepfold is itself a monument to continuity. Modern archaeologists speak of “cultivated landscapes of multi-millennial history”; indeed, a Bronze-Age burial mound or Viking cairn often sits not far from a 16th-century barley field.

David Balfour, who researched these isles in the 1850s, lamented that Orkney and Zetland had history “so little known”^[16], partly because their chronicles are few, partly because their past lives in land rather than library. Yet the landscape itself preserves it. Walking Shetland’s heather feels like leafing through an old manuscript: every bloom of pink ling, every line of turf wall, is a mark on the page of the past.

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