Unst - a thin place

I seek thin places; they make me feel alive, deep in my heart and bones. They tend to help me hear the land in a way that is difficult with the noise of populated places like Guernsey.

I have a sense Guernsey was a thin place once, and Pleinmont retains a glimmer of this, but it’s not like other thin places I have had the fortunate to visit and certainly Unst is on a different level entirely.

As if often the case, I never intended to visit Unst. It was Shetland that had drawn me, from watching the series over the years and just getting this feeling about the land. Then I found out about Stanydale Temple, a Neolithic horse shoe shaped structure, which is aligned with the Equinox sunrise.

I’ve wanted to visit for a good while now, but like all dreams, there is a timing to these things. Finally the moment came and I made the bookings, drawn to a particular property 10 minutes from Stanydale. Only I didn’t realise, that Northlink ferries were running a reduced schedule during March so we ended up having an extra night to cover.

I stumbled then across a blog about a family visiting Unst and I saw photos of standing stones, which got me interested. Then I realised that Unst was included in Ben Fogle’s sacred Scottish island programme, the  most northerly place in UK and home to Mother Mary, who sought solitude and peace through prayer on this remote island.

It seemed quite an effort to get there but something made me enquire into accommodation and I decided that if this sorted itself easily for the right dates, it would be aligned, if not, we’d give it a miss. A very kind lady called Sarah immediately offered us a Norwegian chalet at preferable rates so I booked.

We travelled from Guernsey through Gatwick and up to Inverness, driving 40 mins to Findhorn – another thin place – to stay with my yoga teacher for 2 nights, before driving three hours to Aberdeen and catching a 14.5 hour ferry via Orkney to Lerwick on Shetland. We then drove 40 minutes up mainland Shetland, caught a 20 minute ferry to Yell, drove a further 20 minutes across Yell, before catching a 10 minute ferry to Unst. We do love an adventure!

Immediately upon arriving at the chalet, a ten minute drive from the boat and up a steep hill with absolutely stunning views, I spotted stones in the next field and quite by chance realised we were staying right next door to two cairns. Strangely they don’t appear on any local maps nor on Megalithic portal but there is no denying they are Neolithic, and I was gifted my first sheep skull.

That set the scene for the trip. It’s a magical place infused by frequent rainbows on account of the regular change in weather, one minute sunshine, the next hailing, then more sunshine, before rain and wind, then calm and sunny again. It’s four seasons in one day, which I quite like, as long as I’m dressed appropriately.

But that’s another thing I love about these places, if that you dress practically for surviving the elements, which brings a certain grounding to a place, no one is trying to be something they’re not, or dressing for someone else. There’s a certain realism to it.

The other thing though, that I just love about these thin places is the lack of humans. I value my peace of mind and nothing challenges it more than too many people making too much noise and living without any regard for nature. Here you very aware that you are a part of nature, that there is no separation, and this shifts the energy of place considerably.

You can tune in more easily and hear the land. The longer you’re out on it, walking, sitting by stones, feeling the wind, the hail, the cold, the more you flow into it, the more it flows through you. You begin to remember your place in things. You realise how easy it is to get distracted by the mainstream, by the collective conditioning.  

Instead, here, nature tugs at you, asks you to get quieter, calmer, lower, closer to the Earth, to remember. It’s a tonic for the soul and boy, did I need that.

I got my stone eye in quickly, and they started appearing, even Ewan spotted a potential stone circle. There are so many unmapped, so many quartz and this glorious glinting schist. 

I’m totally the opposite to my stone friend with whom I sometimes travel. He plans each day, prepares with maps and parking spots, leaves nothing to chance. I know I want to go somewhere, I get this urge, this pull, and usually there’s a stone that initially draws me, but that’s it, I leave the rest to chance, to where the land, my soul, the great mystery, whatever you wish to call it, calls me.

I have been increasingly trying to orientate my life this way for some time, but it’s tricky when working with others and our need for plans and bookings – our attempts at making things certain and known. Yet to me this planning and scheduling destroys a flow, it creates stress because we’re always up against the clock and things not always feeling aligned in each passing moment – the Gregorian calendar has a lot to answer for.

Thin places, this flow, nature, all of this encourages us to increasingly settle with the unknown, moment to moment, opening us up to the Great mystery and to magic, to the sacred, that cannot be grasped, defined, catalogued, even talked about, because words are not enough.

Worda are not enough to describe Unst to you. Even the photos, the stones, the beaches, the birds – oh my, the geese, the gannets, the birds with long pointed beaks – the heather, the rainbows, the wind, the sun, the rain, the hail, the laughter, the freezing cold wild swim, the simplicity, the friendliness, the seals, the community, the honesty crystal box, the Vikings, the sheep, the Shetland ponies, the land, don’t do justice to the feeling, to the connection to something that cannot be named, a certain edge where life will never, can never, be lived the same.