June 2023

Recently I spent two days in Lerwick, the capital of Shetland. It’s an attractive old town, looking eastwards over the anchorage of Bressay Sound, and the museum is lovely. One of the most interesting walks is along the south end of Commercial Street. Here there is a row of picturesque old stone houses which front onto the street and project at the back into the sea. They have small private piers attached to them, known as ‘lodberries’, from an Old Norse word for a flat stone used as a natural quay. These houses were merchant’s dwellings with a landing place, later a built pier, where goods could be brought ashore from ships anchored in the Sound. During the late 17^th C to early 19^th C they lined the entire Lerwick seafront.

A good example is “The Lodberry” at 20 Commercial Street, also known as Robertson’s Lodberry after Baillie John Robertson. It is an A-listed 18C building or rather a group of buildings around a small courtyard, including a shop fronting onto the street, a two-storey house behind it, and a storehouse with a door to the lodberry and a wall crane.

Shetland’s main export for centuries, from the Norse period onwards, was dried and salted fish. Knitted woollen goods, particularly coarse woollen stockings, were another important commodity. “Grease butter” ie. butter of such poor quality that it could only be used for greasing carts was recorded as a trade item by German merchants in the 17C, who incidentally also bought it from Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Grease butter was one of the main items tenants paid as rent to the lairds. Never having used a wooden cart pulled by a horse, I had never considered that milking cows to provide axle grease could be so important. The Shetlanders got beer, meal, salt and linen cloth in return.

Shetland had close ties with Norway. The islands had been settled by Norwegian Vikings and were part of Norway until the late 15C. The Norwegian dialect, Norn, was spoken in Shetland until the 19C. Initially Shetland traded with Norway mainly through the city of Bergen. Bergen and Lerwick are both on virtually the same latitude (round about 60 degrees north) and are only 358km apart. For comparison,  Lerwick and Aberdeen are 361km apart, only 3km difference. Between the 15^th and 17^th centuries, trade around the North Sea was mainly in the hands of the Hanseatic League, a confederation of north German merchant cities, who, like multinational companies today, had more power than many sovereign states. One of their major trading centres or ‘kontors’ was in Bergen. After the mid 15C many German merchants started trading directly with Shetland rather than through the kontor at Bergen, against the rules of the Hanse. At the end of the 16C large numbers of Dutch fishing boats came to Shetland waters every year for herring. They anchored in Bressay Sound, living and processing the fish on board, held a fair every year near Lerwick, and traded with the Shetlanders for fresh food and woollen stockings. This is when Lerwick first started to become a town rather than a collection of shoreside booths.

Unfortunately, at the beginning of the 18C, climate changes associated with the Little Ice Age, plus major political changes had an adverse effect on Shetland’s trade with Scandinavia. The Shetland islands were by that time part of Scotland, and the Act of Union between Scotland and England in 1707 led to an increase in the tax on salt which was vital for the trade in fish, as well as increased customs dues. This was a difficult period for the ordinary folk in Shetland, as the merchant lairds took over foreign trade and their tenants became virtual serfs, until the 1886 crofters act. However, in the 19C Lerwick became a centre for the highly profitable herring fishery which reached its peak in the early days of the 20^th century before dying out as the over-exploited fish stocks dwindled in the 1920s.

Fishing and fish farming still contribute a third of Shetland’s economic output. The few surviving lodberries are a reminder of the long history of fishing in the islands.