Category:Shetland Lighthouses

The treacherous waters around Shetland have claimed many vessels, over the years, of all shapes and sizes, with the loss of a great many lives.
In an attempt to counteract this, numerous lighthouses have been built to aid shipping in the navigation of these waters.
The first lighthouse built on Shetland was at Sumburgh Head in 1821. The engineer for the project was Robert Stevenson Snr., and the builder was John Reid of Peterhead.
This was the first of many lighthouses to be built by the Stevenson family.
The last major lighthouse to be built was on Foula in 1986, and between these two there are another 37, plus many small minor lights and navigational markers, protecting various danger spots around the islands.
Most notable of all the lighthouses, and perhaps rightly so, is the Muckle Flugga Lighthouse, the most northerly lighthouse in Britain, which was first lit in 1858. The lighthouse stands some distance from it's shore base at Burra Firth, in the north of Unst.
The lighthouses such as Sumburgh and Muckle Flugga, along with Bressay, are the most obvious and picturesque. But others have more recent historical connections to shipwrecks, such as the Ve Skerries Lighthouse, built in 1979, on the dreaded skerries which claimed the Elinor Viking in 1977, and before that, the Ben Doran in 1930.
Over the years advances in technology have meant that none of the lighthouses are manned now, the last one to be automated being the Fair Isle South Lighthouse which was automated on March 31 1998.