Shetland Day 3 - Sumburgh and Scraefield
After a day of drawing in the studio space at Sumburgh Head Lighthouse yesterday, today was another day of ruin-site exploring.
On my way down to meet the bus at Sumburgh Hotel, I looked in the remains of a radar hut in the lighthouse grounds, part of Sumburgh Head Admiralty Experimental Station 1. A radar station was constructed here in autumn 1939 [1].
It had been argued by the Northern Lighthouse Board and others that a military installation within the grounds of a lighthouse broke the Geneva Convention, which stated that lighthouses were not legitimate military targets. However the station was still established, and would got on to play a fundamental role in thwarting a surprise German air raid at Scapa Flow on the evening of 8th April 1940. An account of this can be found on the Sumburgh Head Lighthouse website, here.
The grey afternoon was then taken up with an interesting walk to Scraefield, a site atop the highest hill above Quarff. There were two strange concrete buildings here, raised above the ground on blocks. I had taken them for being war-era, and photos online stated they were war time radio station buildings. However, discussion on a local online forum [2] suggests they were for the GPO (General Post Office) and built in the 1930s/40s, but perhaps constructed in preperation of hostilities - if ever Germany were to dredge up the connector cable that then ran between Sandwick and mainland Scotland, the station was to be used as a means of communication. A source describes the site as an ‘ultra short wave radio station, supplied with electricity from Lerwick’.
They were certainly an eerie presence on the otherwise deserted hilltop, and more evidence of early 20th century communication technologies increasingly being deployed at remote locations, meaning wilderness landscapes were at this time increasingly ‘inhabited’ by surveillance and signals.