With a summer approaching that’s likely to feature more UK breaks than summer beach holidays in Spain, now seems a good time to talk about my night at Loch Spiggie.
I was in Orkney for a few days and figured I’d pop over to Shetland because it’s right there and because it’s quite a trek from my home right down in the south of England and I thought I should at least get a glimpse of Shetland while I could.
I didn’t fancy Lerwick and I have no idea why. This was back in… what, 2013? No, 2011 apparently. Wow, time flies. A whole decade ago. So forgive me if details like this escape me. Anyway, I settled on Loch Spiggie, which is right down in the south of the island. The nearest bus stop is a quick and easy bus ride from the airport but the catch is that the nearest bus stop is a mile and a half away back on the main road. I’d found a closer bus stop but perhaps buses weren’t running to it at that time of year or the timings were so terrible that it was better to walk. Either way, walk I did.
I stayed at the Spiggie Hotel (which has been under new ownership for about the last five years and is currently closed for obvious reasons). I don’t know that I’d stay there now. It felt a bit like I’d strayed into a horror movie – an old-fashioned isolated country hotel, the only guest there, a wooden wardrobe in my room that I flatly refused to open. Not that there was anything wrong with it apart from that the decor was a bit dated and that if there were any other guests they were quiet enough that I never detected them. But these days my Spidey-sense says “go to Lerwick and find a nice busy boring chain hotel with a view of a brick wall”.
I’d only brought a small bag so I didn’t need to touch the cursed wardrobe. I’d left everything else back in my guesthouse on Orkney and rather than sit in my creepy-but-fine room until bedtime, I walked down the road to Loch Spiggie.
Loch Spiggie was once an inlet of the sea until the sandbar grew thick enough to separate it. It’s a nature reserve, teeming with birds but the only ones I saw – or the only ones I paid attention to – were a flock of swans bobbing on the loch and whatever was standing on the back of one of the curious sheep I saw on the way down the road. It was a breezy day and the loch was grey and choppy and not a terribly appealing place to stop and stare.
On the other side of the road, however, was a path leading across the field to Spiggie Beach and that… well, that was a revelation. It’s not a very well-kept secret that the Scottish islands have some spectacular beaches hiding away and even on a fairly grim October afternoon, I could see that this was glorious. The sand was silver – well, ok, it was grey, but it was pale and it absolutely wasn’t the yellow-brown-gold I’m accustomed to. Even under a horrible sky, the sea was multiple shades of blue, from turquoise near the beach to Arctic navy further out. I reckoned the tide was out, giving me plenty of beach and it was deserted. For a moment that didn’t feel creepy and open and vulnerable. I had a stretch of freezing but otherwise gorgeous tropical beach all to myself. Where I live, deserted beaches simply aren’t a thing. Even in winter they’re overrun with locals and dogwalkers and the hardier tourists. An empty beach, and a beautiful one.
The pictures don’t do it justice. Imagine this silver-blue bay on a clear day. Actually, a Google image search suggests that on a nice day it looks a lot less otherworldly and a lot more “mundane nice beach”. I guess it never really gets busy. It’s a good couple of miles from the main road and the turning is just a few miles from the airport. I guess it doesn’t attract tourists in the same way Crawley doesn’t. And then there’s nothing down the road except a six-room country hotel. If you’re after a serving of natural beauty to go with your solitude, Spiggie Beach is for you.
I had to return to the hotel. It was windy and the silver beach was literally trying to sandblast my eyeballs. The hotel was still empty and the wardrobe was still terrifying so I had a bath. I could see Loch Spiggie from my window but I vaguely remember either it being on the ground floor or an unexplained banging noise so I kept the curtains closed and stayed determinedly in the bath with a book.
I’d booked breakfast for 8am. These days that would be horrifically early but my diary says I lay on the bed and watched kids’ TV for half an hour before it was time for breakfast. That’s not like me. I’ve got more into TV since I discovered Netflix but I don’t turn on the TV in hotel rooms. Not claiming intellectual superiority – I sit and scroll Twitter for hours instead. But apparently I watched TV that morning before going down to the dining room to have toast made specially for me. I chatted to the owners, who must have been a little surprised and inconvenienced to have a lone tourist in at that time of year. I told them my plan was to get the bus back to the airport and since they were going shopping, offered me a lift to the airport.
Readers, I accepted it. My flight wasn’t until 3.30pm but I’d figured on a fairly lazy morning, a 30-40 minute walk to the bus stop and a look at Jarlshof, the archaeological site near the airport. But it was a mile and a half and it was windy enough to take the paint off the car. I had ten minutes to kill at the bus stop, although I remember it as an eternity. I discovered that if I stood behind the bus shelter, I was out of some of the wind but what whipped around my ankles was surprisingly warm.
Jarlshof, the beach and the cliff were out of the question in such weather. I went straight into the airport, straight to the bookshop for more books – plural – and I must have spent five hours sitting there reading. I mean, spending your whole holiday with your nose in a book is a perfectly reasonable and acceptable pastime but I spent basically an entire day of my five-day expedition sitting at an airport waiting for a twenty-minute flight.
(We were hardly in the air before we were told to prepare for landing. It still felt like forever before we actually touched down back on Orkney.)