Bressay Lighthouse

With it still light at Midnight and the sun waking us at 4am, it was definitely midsummer in Lerwick.

A short ferry trip with the bikes to the island of Bressay across the harbour from Lerwick was the order of the day, and what a find it turned out to be.
Low lying on the western side we took a quiet single track road with no traffic to the south of the island as far as we could go, and a chance to see the now unmanned lighthouse built by the father and uncle of Robert Louis Stevenson. The light still shines, but everything is controlled from George Street in Edinburgh.

We found a place in the sun beside an old ruined house to have a picnic and watched a fishing boat plying its way to Lerwick across the Bressay Sound.

As we sat, the sun turned the Sound a deep blue, and the sand pipers with their red beaks darted in and out of the fields which were host to sheep and lambs ( Forgive me if they were not sand pipers, but they did have long red beaks, and obviously weren't sparrows or blackbirds).

The ditches were full of purple clover and the fields full of buttercups. Colourful little boats were tied up beside jetties and washing danced on washing lines and blew dry in the wind.

We turned back and cycled north, but the wind was against us and the scenery was not so gentle and appealing: more moorland like a lot of the mainland.

It was good for a little while to get rid of the hustle and bustle and traffic that there is on the mainland, and to find a more gentle landscape where it is still possible to cycle slowly and smell the roses.