Climb the stairs of Lerwick Town Hall to the magnificent chamber hall on the first floor, and you will find, illustrated in best Victorian stained glass, a pantheon of Viking heroes. Its slate-grey waters, icy and teeming with monsters, marked the boundaries of the world itself.Ī thousand years on, though, and Shetland had come to serve navigators, not as a frontier, but as a crossroads. The northern Ocean, it seemed to the Romans, stood at a forbidding remove from everything that made life bearable: sunshine, wine, olive oil. The allusion is to the circumnavigation of Britain in AD84 by a Roman war fleet and whether “Thule” does indeed refer to Shetland, or else to Fair Isle, or even to Faroe, it concisely conveys the sense of achievement felt by those who had sighted it. Downstairs, emblazoned on one of them, appears a quotation from the Roman historian Tacitus: “Dispecta est et Thule” – “And even Thule was glimpsed”. An inimitably Victorian fusion of Gothic and Scots baronial, its true glory is its stained glass windows. T here is no prouder monument to the history of Shetland than Lerwick Town Hall.
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