DISCOVER SHETLAND

Escape to a wild archipelago at the crossroads of the North Atlantic and the North Sea, where the drama of the landscape outdoes any action seen in the eponymous TV crime series

- Tom Morton

What you are looking for is a calm, clear summer's night, and preferably one of the 14-hour overnight sailings from Aberdeen via Orkney. Then, if you're lucky, the ferry trip to Shetland will be a mini-cruise, including dolphins, orcas, a sighting of the Orcadian sea-stack called the Old Man of Hoy and a sailing into the ‘simmer dim' - Shetland dialect for the midnight sun of midsummer, when twilight lingers through the short night.

The morning arrival in Lerwick never fails to touch my soul with gratitude that I live in such a place. True, sometimes a delayed, rough trip cannoning into a big north-easterly can bring a more physical relief when you finally step on to dry land, but watching the morning sun glitter off fishing boats as they hustle for landing space fairly warms the heart. The Old Rock: it's home.

A RICH CULTURE

It's Shetland, by the way, never, ever 'The Shetlands'. And you're in it, not on it. There are about 100 islands, 16 inhabited. Almost half of Shetland's population of 23,000 live in and around Lerwick, which is on the biggest island, known as Mainland. The two next biggest isles are Yell and Unst. Regular ro-ro ferries connect them. At around 110 miles north of the Scottish mainland, you are well on the way to the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Norway - the Shetland capital Lerwick is further north than Oslo - and the Scandinavian influence here is strong.