Ron McMillan makes a splash on a boat trip in Shetland
The long table is awash with the slim pickings from three gluttonously-rich courses, the last drops of deep red wine are surreptitiously escaping
long-stemmed glasses, and the cafetieres are all but empty, when Henry proposes a boat trip. Never mind that it is after
10 o'clock at night, that there is a sub-arctic breeze blowing, and that most of us - Henry excepted - are better than half cut.
On second thoughts, I concede: maybe because we are already
well-oiled, it seems like the most natural thing in the world, a
late-night motor-boat jaunt in Shetland waters.
If, at this point, you are thinking ''here comes trouble'', the pessimist in you sensing disappointment or danger in the making, then rest easy - because what ensues is a midsummer travel episode so blissful I am almost reluctant to share it. I said almost.
If you are going to fritter away a summer evening in the Shetland Islands, you could do a lot worse than to pass it in good company at a conservatory table overflowing with local gourmet delights and not a few fine glasses of Chilean vino collapso. Surrounded, what's more, by the remote near-wilderness that is Westside, the fat peninsular bump that swells into the frigid Atlantic from the ''mainland'', the largest of Shetland's hundred islands.
Only 27 miles, and a century or two, distance Westside from modern Lerwick, gaps well-underlined by a slow drive down through wind-scorched, peat-lagged hills and valleys and around the tortured edges of a multitude of sea inlets, or voes. Westside occupies hundreds of square miles where the population density is surely below the one-human-per-mile mark, a land where towns that stand bold and proud on the map materialise through the mist as tiny hamlet clusters of starkly-functional houses flanked by fields and peat bogs and not a lot else.
Evident are electricity and telephone lines and satellite dishes, but modern support systems and building materials apart, life around here cannot have changed much over recent centuries. Which makes it the perfect get-away-from-it-all destination. You're a long way from anywhere, and boy do you know it.
Henry Anderton, the kind soul behind the offer of the boat ride, knows a thing or two about getting away from it all. It's in his blood. In 1969, Henry, a native of the Midlands, inherited the Shetland estates of his great uncle, Herbert Foster Anderton, a Bradford wool mill magnate. Great Uncle Herbert snapped up these lands in 1888, shortly afterwards building for himself a grand summer escape-hatch - Buddhist temple and all - on the isle of Vaila. Henry's suggestion is that we make a quick circumnavigation of the 750-acre isle. And so the cry goes up: ''All aboard the MB Curlew.''
From there, it is a brief trip into superlative country. Twin outboards burbling through waters of a clarity that I have only ever before witnessed in the distant tropics. A sky brushed spectacularly with warm pastel colours swept across it by the recently-set sun. Glowing twilight bright enough to read a newspaper by - were it not for the choppy swell of Vaila Sound.
A clockwise course keeps Vaila to starboard, much of its perimeter hacked from sheer cliffs rising 200 and 300 feet from the sea, their rock faces streaked with the bleachy signatures of the thousands of gannets, fulmars and guillemots who call them home.
Perched atop one cliff edge, stands Muckleberry Castle, rather a grand name for an eighteenth-century watchtower built to keep an eye on the fishing fleets working nearby. West of here, lies the island of Foula, population 40; west of Foula is, well, America. All around the castle, the island is carpeted in deep green pasture dotted with Shetland's omnipresent sheep, multiple breeds varying in tincture from snow-white to coal-black and covering every hue in between.
In the relative warmth of the tiny wheelhouse (no fool, me; the rest of them are out the back, shivering), Henry tells me about Vaila. The island was part of his estates until a few years ago, when, after a long search for suitable candidates, he sold it to the present owners, a London lawyer and his art dealer wife. The duo who make up the island's entire population live, for at least part of the year, in the sturdy baronial mansion built by Great Uncle Herbert just over a hundred years ago. Despite its impressive dimensions, Vaila Hall has only 13 rooms, laid out around a vast central banqueting hall. Seen from the water, with flag flapping furiously from tall pole, Vaila Hall has tangible presence.
Back at sea-level, Henry picks our way through rocky coastal obstacles, grand archways like Maany's Hole, and Gaada Stacks, towering rock formations that have somehow survived the fury thousands of northern winters. The island's coastal waters are awash with undersea forests of lush kelp,
home to myriad varieties of sealife that glistens and flickers in the fading twilight.
Too soon, we are back at the eighteenth-century Burrastow House Hotel, operated by Henry's wife Bo Simmons, creator of tonight's wondrous dinner. Promoted by word of mouth and by a popular Internet site, the small hotel attracts visitors from around the UK and as far away as South America and Japan.
These discerning souls seek solitude, birdlife, lovely walks, good sea fishing and the proximity of 4000-year-old archaeological sites such as Stanydale, the
largest Stone Age structure in the Shetland Islands.
All good fun, of course. But how many of them get to circle Vaila late on a midsummer evening?
Info file
Shetland Islands Tourism, Lerwick: tel (01595) 693434. Fax: (01595) 695807. Burrastow House Hotel and Restaurant: tel (01595) 809307. Fax: (01595) 809213. http://users.zetnet.co.uk/
burrastow-house-hotel
Hotel closed January and February.
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