Three Wilderness Settlements in Shetland

STOBISTER, SINNABIST AND STARRAPUND: THREE WILDERNESS SETTLEMENTS IN SHETLAND Brian Smith I start with a brief and simpli ed history of settlement in Shetland. People have lived in the islands for more than 6000 years, and until the nineteenth century the vast majority of them stayed in rural places. We do not know as much as we would like about the settlements of the earliest inhabitants. We assume that most of them lived near the coast, like most of their successors, but the main evidence we have is about the homes that some of them established in Shetland’s hills. The climate and soil in the earliest Neolithic times was better then than it became later, and some of those early Shetlanders lived in places that no-one would never occupy again. A classic example is the long-lived settlement at the Scord of Brouster in Sandsting, an extremely inhos- pitable place today, but occupied for more than a thousand years in the Stone Age (Whittle 1986). During the Bronze Age, partly because of deterioration in the weather, and afterwards, people moved nearer the shore. We know less about the places where Shetlanders lived in the Iron Age, because archaeologists have not found many examples of their houses. Brochs certainly were not houses, in the normal sense of that term, unless we assume that Shetlanders of the broch era chose to live in out-of-the- way and relatively infertile places, like Mousa, Hawksness in Tingwall, or Sotersta, near Culswick in Sandsting. I suspect that our Iron Age ancestors also lived around the shore, exactly where their Bronze Age predecessors had lived, and where their Pictish and Viking and modern successors would also live. In the ninth century people came to Shetland from Scandinavia, and during the following centuries those newcomers occupied nearly every scrap of arable land in the islands. They avoided some of the most marginal places where the Stone Age Shetlanders had lived, but they occupied all the good land around the coast, and in many cases improvable land inshore. We know the places where these Scandinavian people lived, not so much because of archaeology—most of their houses have disappeared—but because they paid a tax for their arable land 420 brian smith called scat, and because they divided up their townships in units called merks of land. The scats that they paid, and the number of merks of land in each township, are recorded in documents (Smith 2000). We can sometimes hazard a guess about the age of such settlements from their names: places whose names end in ‘bister’, for instance, are usually assumed to date from the rst couple of centuries of the Scandinavian colonization of the islands. But as we shall see, that was not always the case. There was no doubt a blip in this history of Shetland settlement, during the late Middle Ages, when the Black Death and other kinds of depression took their toll on the population. Then about the end of the fteenth century things started to improve again. By Earl Patrick Stewart’s time, around 1600, there were probably about 10,000–12,000 Shetlanders (Donaldson 1958, 135–6), and they occupied, or had reoc- cupied, most of the settlements that had been inhabited during the Middle Ages. They still paid scat for them, and they still measured them in merks of land. There were bad times again at the end of the seventeenth century, thanks to smallpox, and bad weather, and foreign wars, and a few places went out of use again, brie y. But that was a very short interlude. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the economy of Shetland boomed, and between 1760 and 1860, with smallpox conquered, the population doubled (Thomson 1983). Since the Scandinavian and early modern settlement of the islands had involved all the good land, much of that burgeoning modern population had to live in the increasingly crowded ancient townships, or on what were called ‘ootsets’: outlying parts of the old arable land, or even (a return to the Stone Age habit) scraps of land in the hills. The reason I present this long introduction is to suggest that we understand the history of Shetland settlement relatively well. Most of it, from Bronze Age until Victorian times, was clustered near the shore, with outlying settlement in the hills in Neolithic times and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this paper, however I deal with a small number of settlements which diverge from the normal pattern: Stobister in Bressay, Sinnabist, between Sandwick and Cunningsburgh, and Starrapund in Sandness, and some others that I have spotted from time to time (Illus 47). Stobister, Sinnabist and Starrapund are old settlements, and I shall argue that two of them at least were occupied during the Stone Age. But none of them is mentioned in taxation lists, and none of them, I .

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