Walking a straight line

Brindister, West Burrafirth to the Ayre of Whalwick

This is my response to the ‘Walking the Lands First Friday walk’ along the Honeybourne Railway Line; as we don't have a railway on Shetland I thought we should make a walk along a straight line of our own making... using an OS map with a line drawn on it from our croft house in Brindister, West Burrafirth to the Ayre of Whalwick, a small remote bay with what was once ‘a dwellinghouse with outhouses and a few acres of land attached’. Tracking our progress on my phone app, remarkably the line is reasonably straight.

Walking a counter-intuitive straight line in the heather and bog and rock-strewn landscape around Brindister, with its many lochs and streams, requires a deliberate effort to ignore the desire paths that we would usually take. While here in Shetland, liberated from the restrictions imposed by English ‘rights of ways’, we can also walk where we want, the stricture of our route demands constant referral to the OS map and keeping to our straight line. It also involves a lot of discussion (which, in hindsight, we really should have recorded), as we scan the landscape closely for any landmarks that might assist us to keep in the right direction, and lots of pointing.

Surprisingly, although our line studiously avoids most of the obvious landmarks we might more intuitively head towards, it does pass directly through one ancient hilltop cairn, making that stretch of the journey a little simpler than the rest.