The A970 runs the length of Shetland Mainland, and at its southern end it crosses a live airport runway. Barriers drop across the tarmac when a plane needs it, drivers wait, and then the road reopens. This is how you arrive at Sumburgh, a settlement of about a hundred people at the very tip of the island, where crofting fields run green to the cliff edge and the North Sea does the rest.
The Sumburgh Hotel is the only bar and dining room down here, a former laird's home built in 1867, privately owned and standing immediately beside Jarlshof, five minutes from the airport. It serves restaurant and bar meals and is effectively the local for Sumburgh, Grutness and Scatness combined.
Jarlshof is the reason most people come. A storm in the 1890s washed away the shoreline and exposed buildings that turned out to hold four thousand years of settlement, from Bronze Age oval houses through an Iron Age broch and four Pictish wheelhouses to a Norse longhouse twenty metres long, still marked with the lines of timber benches and a central hearth. Alex Curle's 1930s dig uncovered the first confirmed Norse longhouse in the British Isles. The name is not old: Sir Walter Scott invented it, Old Norse for "Earl's Mansion," after visiting in 1814 and using the ruined house in his 1821 novel *The Pirate*.
Beside the airport, Old Scatness hides another broch and Iron Age village, its wall rediscovered during airport works in the late 1970s. The Shetland Amenity Trust runs it as a living-history site with costumed guides, replica Iron Age and Pictish buildings and craft demonstrations.
Sumburgh Head rises to the south, a hundred-metre rocky spur where the lighthouse stands. Robert Stevenson, grandfather of Robert Louis Stevenson, built it, and the light was first lit in 1821. The restored buildings reopened in 2014 as a visitor centre, opened by the Princess Royal, with a seasonal café.
The clifftop path to the lighthouse is uneven and steep in places, with two stiles, though a wheelchair-accessible lookout sits fifty metres south of the car park. In summer the cliffs are loud with puffins, fulmars, guillemots and shags, and on calm days minke whales, orcas and dolphins pass below in the Sumburgh Roost, the tide-race that gave the headland its Old Norse name, *Dunrøstar høfdi*, "the head onto the loud tide-race." The puffins have thinned: an estimated 33,000 in 2000 had fallen to 570 by 2017.
A short drive north-west, St Ninian's Isle is reached across the largest tombolo in Britain, a 500-metre sweep of sand walkable in summer and underwater at high winter tides; a hoard of Pictish silver was dug up there in 1958. From the pier at Grutness the *Good Shepherd* sails to Fair Isle. Lerwick and its shops are about twenty-five miles up the A970.
In January 1886 Betty Mouat, a spinner from Scatness, boarded the smack *Columbine* at Grutness for Lerwick to sell her knitting. The skipper was washed overboard, the crew could not get back aboard, and she drifted alone for nine days on two biscuits and a quart of milk before grounding on the Norwegian coast, where fishermen pulled her ashore. She was fifty-nine. Queen Victoria sent a £20 cheque. She went home to Dunrossness and lived another thirty-two years.