Things to do in Shetland

Jarlshof at the southern tip of the Shetland Mainland is one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in Europe, a complex of superimposed settlements representing nearly four thousand years of continuous human occupation that was revealed when a violent storm in the 1890s stripped away the sand dunes that had covered it. The site preserves remains from the late Stone Age through the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Norse periods to the medieval farmhouse that gave it its romantic name when Sir Walter Scott used the ruins as a setting in his novel The Pirate, creating a layered archaeological narrative of exceptional completeness and interest. The earliest remains at Jarlshof are the oval stone houses of a late Neolithic to early Bronze Age settlement of approximately 2500 BC, among the earliest domestic structures in Shetland. Above them the bronze smiths' workshops and round houses of a Bronze Age metalworking community reflect a later period of settlement, and the complex Iron Age broch and its associated wheelhouses represent the most elaborate phase of prehistoric building on the site. The distinctive wheelhouses, with their internal division into rooms radiating from a central hearth like wheel spokes, are one of the most characteristic building types of the Scottish Iron Age and the examples at Jarlshof are among the finest and most complete. The Viking longhouses overlying the Iron Age remains represent one of the most significant Norse farm complexes in the British Isles, their layout and construction providing direct evidence of the Norse settlement of Shetland from the ninth century onward. The medieval farmhouse above completes the sequence, and the substantial ruins of the Old House of Sumburgh, a sixteenth-century laird's house, provide the architectural focus of the site.