Puffin, Shetland

In 2018, although I'd booked flights and intended to travel from Orkney to Shetland to complete my final Scots county, the weather (low cloud, known as haar) was against me. Held for 8 hours in Aberdeen it was hard enough to get to Orkney but then 4 days later the flight from Kirkwall to Sumburgh was delayed then cancelled and with the ferry not running that day and my b&b full, with Loganair unable to promise accommodation or a guaranteed seat on the flight for the following day I had few alternatives and chose to escape on the last flight of the day - back to Edinburgh.

After that I had a wonderful holiday on the west coast of Scotland, but for a while Shetland was the one county in the UK (with the exception of Northern Ireland) that I had not yet walked in.

2019

But in May 2019, supported by Jenny, and following some caretaking and painting on the west coast, we travelled by car, bus, train, bus and ferry via Kyle, Inverness and Aberdeen to Lerwick for a five day holiday. Incidentally the picture above is "Jimmy Perez' House" the house used in the TV series Shetland by the main character, a detective.

There was mixed weather, as you'd expect, but I walked a 4 mile circuit of Lerwick (details from the Visitors Information Centre in Lerwick) and a few miles around Mousa, an island with the best preserved broch in the world. I was really keen to see it close up as I'd only passed it at a distance on a ferry in 1990.

With that as the culmination of my county walks I felt satisfied that 86 counties had been walked, even though many of them deserve a further visit. And so I'm already planning to go back to those I didn't explore enough. But for now my mission is complete.