Day Trip to Papa Stour | The Most Remote Place I’ve Ever Been

Papa Stour, Shetland, Scotland

It’s 8:15am. We’ve eaten breakfast and checked the forecast, and it’s supposed to be a cracker of a day. The ferry office opens at 8:30am – I make the call as we pile ourselves into Julia’s car. One minute later, it’s confirmed – we’re booked as passengers on the 9:00am ferry from West Burrafirth to Papa Stour. Our amazing CouchSurfing host navigates the winding roads like a true islander, and at 8:55am Mac and I are on board the Snolda ferry about to make the 40 minute ride to what will become known as the most remote place I’ve ever been. This day trip to Papa Stour may have started out a bit hastily, but thankfully those were the only chaotic moments of the entire day.

Day Trip to Papa Stour

Forty minutes after leaving the mainland (and a few woozy moments en route), we arrive at Biggings, the island’s main settlement. There are only two other gents on the ferry with us – engineers doing field surveying on the pier. Mac and I are the only non-locals on the island for the day. One sweep of the barren horizon confirms what we heard from the crewmate on the Snolda – only about seven people live on this island year-round.

The houses are few and far between and we take our first steps on the island following the only road. We stumble upon the kirk (church). It’s in a bit of a state of disrepair, but we soon learn that it’s just been bought by the community with the hopes to do some extensive renovations.

The road soon ends and we find ourselves walking alongside the airfield. Yep, Papa Stour has an air strip! The only flights available are from Lerwick on the mainland. We keep snug to the coast and soon discover an impressive cliff face. “Wow, it’s beautiful”, we gasp, as we line up for self-timed photos and stare in utter awe. Oh, how naive of us…

We keep to the coast – Papa Stour has about 34 kilometres (21 miles) of coastline – and the views just keep getting more and more unreal. The sea has eroded the soft volcanic rocks over time. This makes for an unbelievable amount of stunning stacks, blowholes, caves, arches, and cliffs. Each step we take along the coast greets us with a new, wilder, more incredible view.

It’s almost too much to bear. How is it even possible to be continually surrounded by such incredibly beautiful feats of nature? “Wow”, we say over and over again, not being able to form more sufficient words to describe what we see.

Mac peers down a blowhole and sullenly calls out that there are dead sheep below – they likely fell down the hole. I cautiously side-step towards him and suddenly one of them moves! We squint our eyes and move a little closer and discover they’re actually seals!! It’s birthing season for grey seals in this part of the North Atlantic. Thank goodness.

The near-daredevil sheep-fiasco wasn’t initially shocking. We earlier saw a bunch of sheep at the base of one of the cliffs. We studied them for a while, curious as to how the hell they would manage to climb all the way back up to the flat ground. It turns out these sheep must have some sort of mountain goat balance – they scale the cliff like it’s a gentle incline and are soon reunited with their kin.

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Can you spot the sheep at the base of the cliff on the beach?

We round the northwest side of the island and clamber up to Papa Stour’s highest point. At 87m above sea level, Virda Field provides a panoramic view of the entire 828 hectares (3.2 square miles) of the island. There’s also a cairn (stone pile) here, hollowed out inside which provides much welcomed shelter from the relentless wind.

Mac and I meander across the barren plain to one of the bays on the north coast. We see some seals here, coyly following us as we traverse along the coastline.

Eventually we make it over to the bay beside Biggings. We meet a lovely couple who as lived on the island for over twenty years. They run a croft, a small Scottish farm, and were part of the original WWOOF-ing movement (back when it was Weekend Workers on Organic Farms – the first W has now changed to ‘Worldwide’). They invite us in for a cup of tea and we learn all about the garden they keep on the island. This is no small feat – the wind almost never stops blowing, making it next to impossible for crops to flourish. We are led on a tour of their greenhouse and I pluck a perfectly ripe raspberry from the vine. It’s been so long since I’ve had a raspberry!

The setting sun causes us to check our watches; the time catches us by surprise. We arrived on Papa Stour at 9:45am, knowing we had the whole day ahead of us. The return ferry leaves the island for Shetland at 6:55pm. The ferry only operates five days a week (four in the winter). We spent some time in the visitor’s shelter – a step above a primitive hut stocked with tea, coffee, a toilet, fresh water, chairs and books – while we waited for the ferry to arrive. It was here that we were able to begin to process our spectacular day trip to Papa Stour. Nowhere else have I ever been surrounded by such continual beauty with virtually no other people around.

Even while editing the pictures for this post, I was taken back to this special day and my heart swelled a bit. I’ll remember this extraordinary day for a long time to come.

Tell me, where is the most remote place you’ve ever been?

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