A TRAVEL guide has named an ancient site on Shetland as the top place in the UK that should next be declared a world heritage site by Unesco.

It follows Cumbria’s Lake District being given the status, joining the likes of the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal and Machu Picchu.

Wanderlust looked at seven other UK places on Unesco’s “tentative” list of sites under consideration.

Placing The Crucible of Iron Age Shetland first it said it was “remarkable”.

The area includes Mousa Broch, Old Scatness and Jarlshof and is a cultural candidate.

The guide says: “The Crucible of Iron Age Shetland is a combination of three sites scattered across the Shetland Islands. The site on the island of Mousa boasts the tallest Iron Age round tower still standing in the world. Old Scatness, near Sumburgh Airport on the main island, consists of medieval, Viking, Pictish and Bronze and Iron Age ruins.

“Jarlshof, just down the road from Old Scatness includes a round tower and defensive wall and has been described as ‘one of the most remarkable archaeological sites ever excavated in the British Isles’,”.

It added; “The sites were added to Unesco’s Tentative list in 2011. The Crucible of Iron Age Shetland is regarded as one most significant examples of the European Iron Age in an area outside the Roman Empire and remarkable in terms of their original construction and in surviving the ravages of time.

“For the traveller, their evocative setting on the windswept, treeless landscape of the Shetlands is breathtaking and well worth the trip to the UK’s far north.”

The Shetland site was the only one in Scotland selected by Wanderlust.

The Flow Country of Caithness and Sutherland, which is one of the largest and most intact areas of blanket bog in the world, is also on the tentative list, which may be nominated for inscription over the next five to 10 years.

Among the other candidates selected by Wanderlust was Jodrell Bank Observatory in Lower Withington in England.

The Lake District was the 31st place in the UK and overseas territories to be put on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Scotland has six of the sites.

They are Edinburgh Old and New Towns, New Lanark, The Heart of Neolithic Orkney, the Antonine Wall, Scotland’s “greatest man-made wonder”, the Forth Bridge, and St Kilda, in the Outer Hebrides, the country’s only double UNESCO site.