The Shornkeys: Noss and Bressay on the Dunter III

(Note: "Shorkney" is not a real word. We're just using it to write about our recent trip to Aberdeen, Orkney, and Shetland.)

We're coming to the end of our Shorkney posts, which is probably good, since we're also coming to the end of our time here in Scotland (more on that later).

But we've saved one of the best for one of the last: a day trip on the Dunter III to the Noss National Nature Reserve in Shetland.

We hadn't originally planned to take the Dunter III "seabirds-and-seals" cruise, but all our other attempts to get out on the water (in sea kayaks, on a big sailboat, etc) were scrapped by rough seas. But on our last day in Shetland we had calm seas and two empty spots on a last-minute wildlife cruise.

And I am so glad all those other plans fell through! The Noup, which is the local name for the largest of the seabird cliffs on Noss, is truly a world-class natural wonder. As we were pulling out of Lerwick Harbor, our guide and skipper kept lamenting all the tourists on the pier who had "come to Niagara and missed the falls." I have to admit, at first I dismissed this as the hyperbole of a fanatic naturalist--but he was right, the Noup really does belong in the same category as Niagara Falls.

Of course, the bubbling (even childlike) enthusiasm of the Dunter III's crew--much touted in every review I've read of their service--only added to the sense of wonder. Nana and I peppered them with questions throughout the trip, and there wasn't an answer they didn't seem delighted to share.

Seriously, if you only do one thing in Shetland, do this.

Now, to the tour . . .

We started out by going north out of Lerwick, passing a seafood processing plant where the old seals like to hang out (for the free food).

From there, we flitted back and forth between some of the smaller islands in the harbor area. Some of these islands, unlike the larger islands, were sheep-free, with overgrown thickets of wildflowers and grasses providing a perfect habitat for wildlife.

At the little island above, we even caught a brief glimpse of an otter, trying to keep his catch away from a black-backed gull. Otters are famously shy, and according to my dissertation adviser (who has advised me on so much more than my dissertation!), in Scotland seeing one is kind of a big deal. Unfortunately, I could only spy his little head for maybe a second before he got away, but Nana got a much better look. Alas, I couldn't manage a photograph.

From there we circled the rest of the way around Bressay and passed through the narrow strait between Bressay and Noss. This strait, called Noss Sound, is a major breeding and feeding ground for sand eels, which are an important source of food for many of the seabird species around Shetland. Here we were lucky enough to see a puffin in flight. They're much smaller than you'd expect--not much bigger than the span of your hand. They love sand eels, so they make their nests in the hills above the strait.

Apart from its wildlife, Noss Sound is also just a beautiful spot. The ruins of an old WWII signal station crown the hill to the west, but otherwise all is green, blue, and gold. Noss itself has been uninhabited since 1939; it's now all pasture and nature reserve.

Noss Sound is also where the "ferry" crosses from Bressay to Noss. You can see the ferry here:

It's the little inflatable outboard tucked away in those rocks.

From Noss Sound we continued around the southern side of Noss. We passed a few small seabird colonies as we rounded the southeastern tip of the island--black guillemots mostly, whose markings make them look kind of like little penguins, though of course these guys can fly!

The coasts of Noss and Bressay are also shot through with sea caves like these.

But the Noup itself was clearly the highlight. After a look at what I thought were some pretty impressive seabird colonies near the southeastern tip of Noss, we passed a small headland and the Noup came into view.

Words fail me here. The cliff is enormous, bleached white by droppings, completely covered with black guillemots and northern gannets.

(Gannets are beautiful birds: white with black wingtips and pale gold around the head and neck.)

(Wikipedia image--I didn't manage to get a good shot.)

 

Overhead, the gannets circled in numbers so great that the sky was literally darkened by them. They were flying off to find nesting material--we even saw a pair of them fighting over a particularly desirable scrap of netting.

We spent a good long time at the Noup, just watching. (Our guides were kind enough to remind us that, despite the jaw-dropping power of the place, it was probably best for us to keep our mouths closed. Luckily, no one was hit!)

It's hard for me to describe just what made the Noup so awesome. I think it was the complexity and the drama of the place, tucked away only forty minutes out of Lerwick Harbor, a hidden but not-so-secret metropolis where thousands upon thousands of creatures lived out lives so different (and disconnected) from ours. And there are places like this--though not many quite so grand--all around the North Atlantic. It makes the world seem so vast and miraculous.

After we left the Noup, a great skua (a "bonxie" to Shetlanders) chased us in the hopes of nabbing a biscuit. (It would not be disappointed.)

Then we passed under an arch called the Giant's Legs . . .

. . . and moored in a sea cave, where the crew fired up their submersible to give us a look at life under the sea.

It's much more colorful than you'd expect under there--coral, sea anemones, crazy varieties of starfish. You think of the North Sea as a cold, desolate place, but in sheltered areas like this sea cave, life abounds.

We were delayed a bit leaving the sea cave (basically, we lost track of time), but still made it back in plenty of time for our ferry to Aberdeen. I say this because a few potential passengers ditched just before we left port because they were afraid they'd miss their boat back to the Scottish mainland. The crew of the Dunter III guaranteed our connection, so to speak, and even with our delay we got ourselves to the ferry terminal with about an hour to spare.

So the Noup, and the Dunter III? Both musts, both absolutely worth it, both the highlights of our Shetland trip for me!

The Shorkneys: Singing to Seals in Orkney and Shetland

(Note: "Shorkney" is not a real word. We're just using it to write about our recent trip to Aberdeen, Orkney, and Shetland.)

We're going a bit nuts over here at the Educated Burgher, what with all the dissertating and moving to Japan (so soon!). . . which is a bad thing, when you're as nuts as the two of us are to begin with.

Case in point:

Nothing like putting your toes in the North Sea, folks!

But that's not all--we spent a shamefully large portion of our trip singing to seals.

You see, Orkney and Shetland have a ton of the critters, and they're super curious little guys. Any time you're walking along the water (which is pretty much all the time in Orkney and Shetland), you're likely to see at least one of their little heads popping up, watching the strange world of the shore pass them by. They seem especially curious about dogs, probably because they look so much like dogs themselves.

(In fact, the German word for seal is "seehund," or "sea dog." You can tell why from this Wikipedia photo of a harbor seal, one of two species found in the Shorkneys.)

Anyway, the seals are apparently attracted to human voices, and especially human singing. So, naturally, when confronted with a lone seal in the Kirkwall harbor late at night (yes, late at night), Nana's first instinct was to belt out an a capella rendition of "Kiss From a Rose." (The seal is the little black dot in the background.)

Unfortunately, the seal promptly swam away, and our impromptu cover of "Hey Seal" (to the tune of "Hey Jude") met with similar scorn.

We had some more luck in Shetland, where a little family of seals was hanging out in a broad bay we were walking by just south of Lerwick. I assume they were there to watch the dogs passing on the trail. (Again, seals = black dots.)

Then again, it could just mean that seals like Aretha Franklin ("Chain of Seals") more than Seal or the Beatles. But given the very unscientific nature of our study, I would hesitate to draw any firm conclusions.

Bonus: What's the difference between a seal and a sea lion? Basically, true seals spend more time in the water, have no external ears, and short flippers which make them pretty much useless on land.

In contrast, sea lions (and the closely related, but misleadingly named fur seals) have small ear flaps and longer flippers. Sea lions can actually move pretty well on land, with a posture similar to that of a very large and very clumsy dachshund. This combination of cuteness and dexterity probably explains why sea lions the ones you find doing shows at Sea World.

Seals, on the other hand, are pretty much limited to flopping around on their fat stomachs. Hilarious, but not not much acting range. Kind of like Jack Black.

Science Daily says: "Scottish people 'living dangerously'"

From an article on Science Daily, via Fark.com:

Almost the entire adult population of Scotland (97.5%) are likely to be either cigarette smokers, heavy drinkers, physically inactive, overweight or have a poor diet, according to a new study.

From a purely anecdotal standpoint, I'd bet it's the "heavy drinkers" that caught most Scots in this very wide net. But I'd imagine the numbers for much of the US would look similarly grim, just with fewer drinkers and smokers but more overweight, physically inactive, bad eaters.

Then again, 97.5% is a lot of %!

London Museums, Part II: Greenwich

Greenwich has a special place in my heart because of the time during 12th grade astronomy when my friend Najja noticed our textbook had accidentally spelled it "Greewinch," which then became our running joke for the rest of the year. But whatever way you spell it, Greenwich is a treat.

The National Maritime Museum has the actual uniform Nelson was wearing when shot on the quarterdeck during the Battle of Trafalgar. The bloodstains still on the uniform are dramatic, but what I found most touching were the non-regulation stockings, which sailors often wore in place of uniform goods because they were warmer. I like the idea of Britains' greatest naval hero dealing with such a plebeian concern as cold toes.

We also offer a hearty salute to the Discover Greenwich Museum, where Justin accidentally left the camera among a set of foam blocks but fortunately recovered it in time for the rest of the tour. The museum has interesting and accessible information about the town as well as the pre-naval history of the site (including Anne Boleyn's palace).

Greenwich Naval Hospital wasn't really a hospital in the modern sense - that is, a place for treating patients. It was more of a nursing home for sailors too old or injured to serve at sea anymore. It housed sailors between 1694 and the 1860s, when it was closed down, and was funded both by charitable donations and mandatory deductions from the paychecks of active sailors.

Wearing replica pensioner's garb:

Relaxing in a replica Hospital room:

(For those of you who don't think Justin is in enough pictures, that's his shadow on the bunk. That's kind of like a picture of Justin. Maybe?)

But Greenwich, England, did not earn its UNESCO World Heritage status as "Maritime Greenwich" for its museums, even though they're quite nice and spectacularly free of charge. It received it because, among other reasons,

Criterion (ii): Maritime Greenwich bears witness to European architecture at an important stage of its evolution, exemplified by the work of great architects such as Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren who, inspired by developments on the continent of Europe, each shaped the architectural development of subsequent generations...

And

Criterion (vi): Greenwich is associated with outstanding architectural and artistic achievements as well as with scientific endeavour of the highest quality through the development of navigation and astronomy at the Royal Observatory, leading to the establishment of the Greenwich Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time as world standards.

Let's tackle Criterion (ii) first.

Christopher Wren, perhaps best known as the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral, planned the Old Royal Naval College with a dedication to symmetry and under the strict mandate not to interfere with the view of the Queen's House (by Inigo Jones) to the river. In fact, the foam blocks where Justin mistakenly left the camera were there so you could experiment with the way you would have responded, architecturally, to Wren's challenge. I'm fairly sure, however, that Wren had no foam blocks and had to do it the hard way.

Wren ultimately devised this remarkable panorama, seen more clearly in the Wikipedia article here:

The Queen's House is so tiny that Justin and my combined big domes (did you know there wasn't a ski helmet in all of Japan that fit Justin's head?) completely erase it from the picture. Here it is when I relocate to the right:

I always thought my college dining halls were fairly attractive. Compare them to the Painted Hall, they're downright dull.

Those clever things in the middle are mirror tables. Having schlepped all over the world getting neck cramps trying to look at all those ceilings people spent squillions of dollars on, I heartily say, forget the architecture. These tables constitute Greenwich's greatest service to mankind. Here's the ceiling, as photographed in the table.

The man who painted them, James Thornhill, was paid by the yard and eventually knighted for his work. Who wants to volunteer to tell Michelangelo?

The Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul is a lovely English Baroque space for both worship and music. We were lucky enough to visit during a rehearsal by some students from the Trinity College of Music, also located in Greenwich. The acoustics were lovely, as was the chance to sit down for five minutes. Traveling ain't always as glamorous as it looks.


And now on to Criterion (iv), the one about the Royal Naval Observatory. Before coming here, I knew Greenwich more as the home of Greenwich Mean Time than the home of anything else. (It also is the home of Meantime Beer, which is outstanding).

Dava Sobel's (fun and readable) book Longitude outlines Britain's search for a practical way to determine, quite literally, where on earth you were. For a pretty long time, it's been easy to calculate your distance north or south by using the stars. Unfortunately, calculating your distance east and west was not so easy. A mistake might mean that rather than being safely at sea, you were in fact six inches from crashing into Tierra del Fuego.

The solution, devised by clockmaker John Harrison in the mid-1700s, was a clock that worked at sea. If you had three pieces of information - time at your home port (as shown by the clock), the longitude of your home port (previously calculated), and the time where you were (set by noon, the sun's peak in the sky), you could then calculate your longitude mathematically. This represented a colossal breakthrough in navigation, and also in the art of crafting timepieces, since Harrison couldn't use wood (warped by humidity) or weights (rolling at sea) in his oceangoing clocks. The series of clocks he made are on display at the observatory.

The Greenwich Time Ball on top of the observatory here is raised and dropped at 1 PM every day, a holdover from Ye Olden Times as a way to signal the time to ships in the harbor (harbour!), therefore allowing them to set their clocks for navigation. Edinburgh has its own equivalent - a ball on Calton Hill and Edinburgh Castle's One o'Clock Gun, presumably because Edinburgh weather does not always allow you to see the hilltop.

I was so excited at this prospect that I dragged Justin out of the museum in the rain to take a picture.

He was not impressed, hence the lack of climactic "after shot" of the dropped ball. Alas.

The Greenwich Meridian, also known as the Prime Meridian, is the officially designated line for 0 degrees longitude, which means it divides the Western and Eastern Hemispheres. It's like the Equator but going up and down instead of around the middle. Unlike the Equator, it's completely arbitrary. The Equator is astronomically and geologically defined: it marks the location on the earth's surface when the sun is directly overhead at noon on the solstices. It also marks the spot at which every day, regardless of the season, has the same amount of daylight (on Earth, roughly 12 hours. I, by contrast, live in Scotland, where last winter's December solstice featured a soul-destroying six hours and fifty-seven minutes of daylight and the upcoming June solstice will probably be around seventeen hours and thirty-five minutes long. As I write this post, it's 10:21 PM and light enough to read a book outside. It's a weird place, Scotland.)

Anyway, unlike the equator, which has to be where it is, the Prime Meridian could be located anywhere. Beijing. Hoboken. Your house. There was, in fact, a time when other Prime Meridians were in use, most particularly the Paris Meridian by the rival French. But in 1884, when it was put to a vote, Greenwich won by a vote of 22-1. (France abstained). This is primarily due to the fact that just as Britain's navy dominated the seas, Britain's mapmakers dominated cartography, and most people had just become used to calculating their longitude from a British map using a Greenwich meridian. America's choice of Greenwich as the starting point for its domestic time zones, and therefore also for its maps, probably didn't hurt, either. Oh, France - have we always been a thorn in your side? I hope the answer is yes.

So here you have them, folks, a large part of the reason I went to Greenwich and definitely all of the reason I schlepped up the huge hill to the observatory: Photos at the Prime Meridian!

Justin doesn't know which way to go:

Our marriage looks good from the outside, but really, we're not even in the same hemisphere these days:

My brother-in-law Ryan always mocks my family for being slow, but I bet he's never run across two hemispheres in two seconds!

(Ryan is probably saying, "How did that take you two whole seconds?" I blame our camera's busted autofocus, which means it takes us way too long to take pictures.)

So that's Greewinch. Hope you enjoyed!