Verdant Legacy: The Role of Green in Fair Isle’s Past and Present 🏔️ North of Everywhere
🏔️ North of Everywhere
🌍 World Premiere
Welcome to Britain's Most Isolated Inhabited Island
🏝️ I, the Land
I, the land
Now on Fair Isle, because of salt water, and clearings for sheep, there are no such things as trees. The life of wood, and how it shows growth, death, and rebirth, is just a souvenir. There is another kind of ecosystem here, and it works — a solitude, but not loneliness — and a general unwinding of the worlds we have known.
The only thing to stand guard between the solitude and me are two defiant rocky mountains in the distance, as I look out of our kitchen window. Yet these rocks rock! Love it here — in all its stark splendor.
🎬 Explore Fair Isle's Living Landscape
🚢 Journey to the Guardian Mountains
Across the Waters to Lerwick—A voyage aboard the Good Shepherd, approaching the island where mountains stand eternal watch over those who call it home.
🌊 Shetland's Wild Heart
Across Land, Air, and Sea—Navigating Shetland's rugged wonderland where ponies roam free and every journey reveals new aspects of this ancient landscape.
🌅 Where Night Never Falls
Shetland's Endless Daylight—Fair Isle bathed in eternal twilight, where time moves differently and mountains keep their vigil under the midnight sun.
🌾 Dancing Through Paradise
Splendor in the Grass—Skyelark's joyful leaps across Fair Isle's green waves, pure celebration of life in a landscape where mountains witness every moment of joy.
🏔️ Where Mountains Become Teachers
We are all co-creators of the world we inhabit—our choices, decisions, and intentions shape the landscape of our lives. On Fair Isle, we discovered that the best we can do is embrace life in its fullest variety, navigating the savage yet breathtaking country we have built and continue to build, stretching between where we began and where we are headed.
The wind hums like white noise, steady and relentless, rolling along an infinite shore. Waiting becomes its own reward—the labor costs nothing, but the patience pays dividends measured not in currency but in moments of profound connection.
"The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible—to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day."
To walk along these cliffs is to step into the sky. There is no need to look up—it is all around, inhaled in gulps, each molecule of air exchanged in communion with the world. Walking becomes not just movement but celebration, prayer, and inquiry, subtly weaving itself into the fabric of each day.
The mountains stand guard not as barriers but as witnesses—ancient sentinels who have watched countless souls discover that Fair Isle is indeed North Of Everywhere, and that sometimes being north of everywhere is exactly where you need to be.