The bicentenary of Walter Scott’s visit to Orkney, Shetland and Fair Isle
2014 is the bicentenary of Walter Scott’s visit to Orkney, Shetland and Fair Isle with the lighthouse engineer Robert Stevenson. Orkney and Shetland didn’t feature on early nineteenth-century tourist routes, and Scott didn’t know quite what to expect. This film uses extracts from Scott’s own diary as we follow his route through the islands as he encounters sailors, dancers, witches, sea monsters, and an ancient pict.
The full diary was never published in Scott’s lifetime, but you can read it in J. G. Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott