The key to Scalloway Castle hangs at the Scalloway Hotel, on Main Street, and you collect it there or from the Museum before letting yourself into a four-storey ruin on the harbour front. The castle is an L-plan tower house built between 1600 and 1607 for Patrick Stewart, 2nd Earl of Orkney, using unpaid labour summoned from the Shetland parishes. The main tower measures eighteen metres by ten, with a tunnel-vaulted ground floor holding kitchens, stores and a well, a first-floor hall above, and bartizans corbelled out at the third storey. The master of works was Andrew Crawford. Earl Patrick was imprisoned in 1609 and executed in 1615, which tells you roughly how the venture went.
The hotel that holds the key overlooks the harbour and trades on Shetland seafood, in the way harbourfront hotels here tend to. Around it Scalloway is a working village of piers, boats and fish-processing frames rather than a shopping street, with the castle rising over the waterfront on arrival. It sits on the sheltered west coast of the Mainland, six miles and about ten minutes from Lerwick along the A970. Service 4 runs into Lerwick up to thirteen times a day; Service 5 links East Voe out to the bridged islands of Trondra and Burra three times daily. Sumburgh airport is down at the south end of the Mainland.
The waterfront is also where the village keeps its war. Scalloway was the main base of the Shetland Bus, the clandestine operation that ran fishing boats and, later, submarine chasers across the North Sea to German-occupied Norway between 1941 and 1945, carrying agents, weapons and refugees both ways. Norway House, a former net loft, housed the crews, with Inga Roald as housekeeper; the Prince Olav Slipway was named for the Crown Prince, who visited in October 1942. Forty-four men were killed over the course of it. A memorial to them was unveiled on the waterfront in 2003, and the Scalloway Museum, next to the castle, holds the largest collection of Shetland Bus material outside Norway. It opens from late April to early October, weekdays eleven to four and Sunday afternoons.
Some of the men stayed. Kåre Iversen, engineer on fifty-seven crossings, married Christine Slater here in December 1944 and settled. Leif Larsen, who made fifty-two tours and became the most decorated Allied naval officer of the war, is remembered in the same rooms.
For a walk, Gallow Hill rises above the houses; Barbara Tulloch and her daughter Ellen, the last witches burned in Shetland, were executed there in 1690. The bridges built in 1970 carry you out through Trondra to West and East Burra, to Hamnavoe and a scatter of beaches, an easy afternoon's island-hopping without leaving the road.
Scalloway was the capital of Shetland until 1708, when the job passed east to Lerwick. In the century before that, its people twice burned down Lerwick's wooden huts, objecting to the upstart settlement's rowdiness. The old Norse name is Skálavágr, the bay of the hall. The hall is a ruin now, and you can borrow the key to it from the bar.