Shetland, or Zetland as it was still commonly known in the eighteenth century, forms Scotland's northernmost historic county, an archipelago lying, like neighbouring Orkney, under Norwegian and Danish rule for centuries before passing to the Scottish crown in the same royal dowry settlement of 1468 that transferred Orkney. An eighteenth-century survey of the Shetland mainland, more than fifteen miles broad and home to some 15,000 people, found a low-lying landscape broken by countless bays and sounds ideal for shipping, its one significant height, Ronas Hill in the north-west, rising to nearly 4,000 feet above a coastline almost entirely given over to fishing.
Lerwick, the islands' only town with close to a thousand inhabitants, shipped the produce of this fishing economy, along with fine wool stockings knitted by local women, to markets as far afield as Hamburg and Leith, since almost no local manufacture beyond textiles had yet taken root; rents across the islands were still commonly paid in kind rather than money, a survival of older Norse custom the surveyor noted with some sympathy for the tenants involved. Bressay Sound, sheltering the isle of Bressay just east of the mainland, was reckoned one of the best natural harbours anywhere in the world, supporting a substantial fishing fleet even from so small an island.
Fair Isle, remote between Shetland and Orkney, and Unst, the northernmost inhabited island in the whole of Britain, with its ironstone, jasper and serpentine rock and its own small stock of native sheep and ponies, completed an archipelago whose Norse heritage, hardy livestock and fishing economy gave Shetland an identity as distinct from the rest of Scotland as any county in the kingdom.