Shetland.  May 2018

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I'd expected a bleak, cold landscape, wind and rain, crashing waves, cruel seas, but the sky was blue, the sea like glass, the sun warm.  The May weather, I was told, had last been like this in 1949.

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Instead of drawing the sea, I walked across the land, finding ancient settlements, standing stones, temples, derelict cottages. This is not a wild, untouched landscape. Every inch of this land has been touched, handled, moulded, changed, altered over thousands of years.  It is not an unpopulated landscape but de populated.  People have left the land to find easier lives but the land still remembers them.

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