Muckle Flugga
Muckle Flugga is the most northerly point of the British Isles that bears a permanent structure, a wind-lashed, wave-battered stack of rock rising from the wild waters north of Unst, the northernmost inhabited island of Shetland. Sitting at roughly 60°51' North, it is closer to the Arctic Circle than to London, and its name — derived from Old Norse meaning "large, steep-sided island" — suits it perfectly. The rock is dominated by its lighthouse, which has stood here since 1854 and is one of the most dramatically situated lighthouses in the world. Together with the nearby rocky skerry of Out Stack, which lies just to the north, Muckle Flugga marks the very edge of the British landmass, a place where the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea converge in a perpetual clash of tides, currents and weather systems.
The lighthouse was constructed under the supervision of David and Thomas Stevenson — uncles of the famous author Robert Louis Stevenson — in remarkable circumstances. It was initially built as a temporary structure in 1854 to guide Royal Navy ships during the Crimean War as they made their way north. The permanent lighthouse followed in 1858. The construction itself was an extraordinary feat of engineering and human endurance, with workers clinging to the precipitous rock face in conditions of unrelenting wind and spray. Trinity House records from this period speak of the extraordinary difficulty of landing materials and keeping men safe on the storm-wracked stack. Robert Louis Stevenson himself visited the region as a boy when accompanying his father on inspections, and some scholars have speculated that the isolated geography of Unst and the Shetland seas influenced the map he later drew for Treasure Island, with the shape of Unst bearing a resemblance to that fictional island.
The lighthouse was manned continuously for well over a century, with keepers and their families living in extraordinary isolation at the top of the world. The last resident keepers departed in 1995 when Muckle Flugga was automated, ending a tradition of human habitation on one of the most remote outposts of British life. The keepers' cottages on the headland of Hermaness on Unst, which once served as a shore station, are now ruins, though the lighthouse itself continues to function, its light flashing to warn mariners of the treacherous rocks. The fog signal, too, was a notable feature for many years, its sound carrying far out to sea in the thick sea mists that are common in these latitudes.
In person, Muckle Flugga is a place of overwhelming elemental power. The rock itself appears as a dark, jagged finger of ancient metamorphic stone rising steeply from an ocean that is almost never calm. The lighthouse perches on top with what seems like impossible audacity, its white tower gleaming against a sky that can shift from brilliant Arctic blue to iron grey within minutes. The sound environment is dominated by wind — even on relatively mild days, the gusts here are significant — and by the constant crash and surge of the sea against the base of the stack. Seabirds wheel and cry overhead in their thousands, and the smell is intensely oceanic: salt, kelp, and the faintly bitter scent of guano from the seabird colonies.
The surrounding landscape amplifies the sense of being at the world's edge. Hermaness National Nature Reserve, which occupies the northern tip of Unst, is managed by NatureScot and is one of the finest seabird reserves in Europe. The moorland of Hermaness is carpeted with heather and bog cotton, and the clifftops are home to enormous colonies of puffins, gannets, great skuas (known locally as "bonxies"), fulmars, and guillemots. The great skuas are notorious for their aggressive dive-bombing of human visitors walking through the colony — head covering is strongly advised. Looking north from the clifftops of Hermaness, Muckle Flugga sits perhaps 1.6 kilometres offshore, and beyond it, Out Stack is visible on clearer days, the very last smudge of British territory before open ocean stretches all the way to the Arctic.
The journey to see Muckle Flugga requires commitment and is itself part of the experience. Visitors must travel to Shetland, typically by overnight ferry from Aberdeen operated by Serco NorthLink Ferries, or by short flight from Aberdeen, Inverness or Edinburgh. From Lerwick, Shetland's capital on the Mainland, the drive north to Unst requires two short ferry crossings: first from Toft to Ulsta on Yell, and then from Gutcher on Yell to Belmont on Unst. The entire journey from Lerwick takes around two hours in good conditions. From the main road on Unst, a well-marked path leads out across the Hermaness reserve to the clifftops, a walk of roughly three to four kilometres each way across open moorland. The path can be boggy and exposed, so appropriate footwear and weatherproof clothing are absolutely essential regardless of the season.
The best time to visit is generally late spring through early summer, when seabird activity on the cliffs and moorland is at its peak and the days are extraordinarily long — Shetland experiences the "simmer dim," a prolonged twilight in which the sky never fully darkens around midsummer. Puffins and gannets are present from roughly April through August. Autumn brings dramatic storms and migrating birds, and birdwatchers come from across Europe during October and November for the rare passerines that turn up on these windswept shores. Winter visits are for the truly hardy, as storms can be severe and the days very short, but the Northern Lights are sometimes visible here, and the sense of wild solitude is profound.
One of the more delightful facts about Muckle Flugga is that it appears in the works of Lewis Carroll. Carroll visited Shetland in 1871, the same year he published Through the Looking-Glass, and it is widely believed that the shape of Muckle Flugga and its lighthouse inspired the walrus and carpenter chapter, with the setting's rocky, oceanic character feeding his imagination. Whether or not this is strictly proven, it is a connection that locals cherish. The lighthouse is also notable for the extraordinary difficulty it continues to pose to maintenance teams, who must use helicopters to access the rock for servicing, since landing a vessel at Muckle Flugga in most weather conditions is essentially impossible. The Trinity House engineers who attend to it are among the small number of people who have actually set foot on the island in recent decades, making it one of the most inaccessible permanently lit structures in Britain.