A passion for the Wartime Heritage and Archaeology of Shetland.

There is a moment on almost every tour when someone stops walking.

Not because they are tired. But because they’ve noticed something. A name on a gravestone. A gun emplacement framing a view they recognise. A street they have walked down before, but suddenly see in a different way as it was the home of a soldier who never returned from war.

That meaningful moment we pause and reflect, is one to be held dear.

I grew up in Lerwick. I have never really left – not in my head, at least.

From a young age, and from the last of that 'Airfix soldier and Action Man' generation, family trips took me to special wartime sites across Shetland and beyond. I remember being on holiday in Jersey, exploring bunkers, gun placements, and endless wartime structures. I never thought concrete could be so interesting.

Back home in Lerwick, the history was all around me. My grandfather served on the Western Front in the First World War. I grew up with his photograph on the wall, a sense that these were not distant events but things that had happened to someone I was connected to.

There is not a time I pass the Garrison Theatre old Drill Hall in Lerwick that I do not think about him. I think about the more than 200 men who trained in that building and left for the Western Front in 1915. A lot of them never came back.

That feeling has never left me. It is what I am trying to share with you when we walk together. We all have our own story to tell. You can read about Shetland's wartime history. There are books, articles, and archives. I have written some of them myself.

But reading about a gun emplacement is not the same as standing inside one, looking out across the same water in the direction which those that were there did.

For me, nothing compares to standing in a place where something happened. Nothing. Walking the ground, looking at the sky, being able to point and say: this is where it was. That is when it becomes real – not just for me, but for you.