The cavern club

ONE way of crossing from the west side of mainland Shetland to Papa Stour is to get a lift over with a local. On my first trip to the island guest house owner Andy Holtbrook made the half-hour crossing in his Orkney longliner to collect me at Sandness Pier.

An impressive swell midway across the Sound of Papa gave notice that this was a serious, if brief, sea crossing. My growing respect for the environment then turned to panic as Andy steamed straight for what looked like a solid cliff, but a fissure soon widened into a cave and then a watery tunnel into which we sailed, emerging at the other side in Housa Voe, around whose sweeping, sandy arc most of the remaining steadings are scattered.

That short cut through Brei Holm was my first sight of Papa Stour's famous sea caves. "There are caves and caves, but probably none in the British Isles which excel those this little isle can show in weird, fantastic outline and rich colouring combined", was how Victorian traveller John Tudor described them.

Shetland Canoe Club annually forms a flotilla at Sandness to make the crossing and spend a weekend paddling in the shimmering labyrinth of Brei Holm, the immense cavern of Kirsten's Hole, the smaller but more perfectly formed Francis's Hole and the kilometre long Hole of Bordie. I passed through this last tunnel, which twists from one side of the island's western headland to the other, in a small boat with some friends and a powerful torch, terrified by the combination of pitch darkness and the thundering of tidal waters being forced through unseen cracks in the rock all around us.

Other specialist enthusiasts for this three-mile long island, little known even among Shetlanders, are the archaeologists who are attracted to its mixture of Bronze Age, early Christian and Viking remains. Already unearthed is a building thought to have been the 13th century residence of Duke Haakon, later King of Norway. Last summer a team from Glasgow University turned its attention to Brei Holm, the aforementioned honeycombed chuck of rock once joined to the island by an isthmus, now reduced to a shingle beach exposed at high tide. They camped on the islet for three weeks, during which they found enough evidence of pre-Viking Christian settlement to support the view that this was the site for the hermitary which gave the island its name.

The Norsemen named Papa Stour (Big Island of Priests) - and all the other Papas and Pabays around Scotland's shores - after the monks they found there, most likely a coracle-borne diaspora of missionaries from Iona.

If you do not intend to scale pinnacles of rock surrounded by pounding surf, or explore the island's innards by kayak, you can discover the land that time forgot with your own two feet.

Walk round Papa Stour's varied shore of towering cliffs and white sands and you'll come across piles of sun bleached driftwood dragged above the tideline long ago, the untouchable property of beachcombers who migrated or passed away before they could bring their finds to the hearth. You'll pass the remains of dwellings, no more than rectangular hummocks, as old as Stonehenge and cast your eyes over views unchanged by the passing centuries: to the south west the monumental profile of Foula with its 1300-foot cliffs, to the east the mainland's single significant slope of Rona's Hill.

But the main characters in this ever changing scene are the sea and the sky, for this is an unobstructed northern space, at times serene, lowering or enraged, but always awesome.

Winter is probably my favourite time on Papa Stour, when the slanting northern sunlight ignites the red sandstone, of which the island is mainly composed, and tinges the water purple and pink. Seals congregate in the sheltered bays to strike up their weird chorus, as if in rehearsal for some sea kingdom concert.

If the elements threaten to overwhelm a touch too literally, the views from the spacious upper deck lounge of North House, combined with Sabina Holtbrook's excellent home cooking, will ensure that a stay on Papa Stour is a battery charger whatever the weather NEED TO KNOW Seven nights at Club Colonna from #770 per person sharing a double room, including flights and transfers. Price also includes breakfast, afternoon tea and a combination of four evening meals and two lunches. Call Sunsail on 023 9222 2222, or log on to www.sunsail.com Sunsail also offers a week at the Club, followed by a week's sailing and living aboard a yacht in a guided flotilla. Or you can spend a week on a yacht independently exploring the area.

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