On the last day of our visit to Shetland, we stopped just short of the islands' quite modern airport to visit part of Shetland's oldest history: Jarlshof, a partly-excavated site that shows signs of people's lives from the Stone Age to the 1760s.
My visit was pretty much a self-service experience; the small visitor center just beyond the wall is not always open, and there's not always a guide for guided tours, but a well-marked path and lots of explanatory signs were quite helpful.
Jarlshof's story is kind of surprising: despite thousands of years of human life there, by the late 1800s no one knew anything was there except the ruins of a 16th century manor house. Without knowing anything about it, Sir Walter Scott peopled the area with a Viking settlement and contributed the name, meaning the residence of a Viking chief, or Jarl.
That changed in the last years of the 19th century, when violent storms ripped away part of the shoreline, exposing remains of buildings, tools and other objects. No serious excavation was done until 1925. By that time, of course, some of the early discoveries had been moved or damaged, but much remained to be learned. During those excavations it became clear how many periods were involved.
A series of modern scientific excavations in 1949-52 are the last done in the area, and that was before the advent of radio-carbon dating, so Jarlshof remains, possibly, a strong candidate for more exploration.
Its very green appearance, by the way, is not entirely natural; areas of sod were placed to limit damage to the stone structures by either weather or visitors. The area faces a relatively sheltered bay, the West Voe of Sumburgh, where the peninsula opposite acting to shelter the near shore must have been a help in all ages. In the other direction, there's a view of Sumburgh Head Light, one of a series of Shetland lighthouses built by the family of Robert Louis Stevenson.
The map at the start of the trail gives a pretty good overall picture of the site. The area nearest the visitor center includes the neolithic finds; moving to the left along the shore shows the bronze and iron age remains, below the walls of the Laird's House. These continue on around to a round 'wheelhouse,' a type of structure unknown outside the Scottish islands. Across the road from that are the long remains of Viking longhouses; at their end, the remains of a medieval farmhouse, at an angle. And last, the remains of a manor built in the 17th century by people who may well have had no idea how many had lived on the spot before them.
The remains of a bronze-age smithy, from about 800 BC. In its heyday, it may have looked like the second picture. During the excavation, archeologists found both tools and products.
Nearby are the remains of early oval houses; the illustration below is only a guess of what the roof might have looked like, but not a bad one, since wood has always been scarce in Shetland. The people who lived there left traces that tell the archeologists that they relied heavily on shellfish from the bay, as well as on grazing cattle and sheep and growing some grain.
Stone 'querns' like this were used to grind the grain with a back-and-forth motion, which must have been long and hard work before someone invented the wheel!
Further down the path, we come to one of the major identifiable structures, an iron age 'broch.' There are quite a few of these in Shetland, some of them more or less intact, looking like small isolated towers, but none has an intact interior. Which is perhaps why there is so much mystery to them. Built between about 400 BC and 100 AD, they were windowless towers, up to 10 metres, with a double wall. It's not known why they were built, who lived and worked in them or why they stopped being built. The illustration is a best guess.
There's plenty of evidence for a fair number of people to have lived here at any given time, with quite a few buildings—and the number may be even greater because there is much more that could be excavated.
Continuing around the site, I came to the wheelhouse area. These were partly-subterranean round buildings, covered with a turf roof that date to the late iron age, later and less outwardly imposing than the brochs. And by the way, they were better at milling; by their time the wheel had been invented in the form of round querns that could be spun over the grain.
'Across the road' from the wheelhouses, Vikings began to settle around 850 AD; it's not clear whether they encountered previous inhabitants or whether time and weather had already covered the area. They settled in and began to build typical longhouses, just as they did when colonizing Iceland a century or so later.
Originally the longhouses were long single-room structures, but by the 1100s they tended to be divided, with separate areas for animals and people.
Over time, the longhouse continued to develop into more specialized spaces; by the time of the medieval farmhouse, built around 1300, that adjoined the original Viking settlement, it would have been possible to recognize its ancestry and also to see it as a prototype of later Scandinavian farm house types. In the illustration you can also see, at the bottom left, an industry there's evidence for: distilling grain into alcoholic spirits.
In the middle of the 1500s, Shetland, which had been under Norse rule for centuries, changed hands. The Norwegian King was short of cash to pay a dowry when his daughter married James III of Scotland; to raise cash, he pawned Shetand and the Orkneys to James, getting promises that land, language and laws would be preserved, and that they would return to Norwegian rule when the loan was paid off.
Suffice it to say that while Norway offered payment many times over the next century or so, the Scots always managed to avoid the issue, while imposing more and more Scottish law and society on the islands. The process was aided by an influx of lowland Scots migrating north for opportunity.
By the time the so-called Laird's House, actually an imposing small manor house and farm combined, there was really no turning back, and the islands occasionally became embroiled in the twists and turns of Scottish politics. The island was handed off from time to time among various nobles and the crown itself. 
Among those who ruled the island were the Stewart earls, related to the kings and with a reputation as harsh rulers. The last of them Patrick Stewart, was eventually hanged for his oppressive ways, but not before he destroyed the Laird's House, which he owned, in a fight with a tenant in 1608. It was later rebuilt, but by the early 19th century, it was little more than the ruin we see.
It was in that state that Sir Walter Scott visited it, was taken with its 'romantic ruin' and used it as a background in this novel, The Pirate. And, he invented a name for it, Jarlshof, which has now become the name of the entire area he could not have guessed was beneath his feet.
If you visit Jarlshof, you'll start at the Sumburgh Hotel, just across from the site. It's a pleasant small hotel with a welcoming bar and tea room. The hotel provides the area with the necessary Three Ts: Tickets, Toilets and Tea. And there are ponies in the field before it.
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