Old Shetland Country Life

Shetland became a possession of Scotland in 1469. The introduction of this book details how the farming and fishing economy developed from then up until the end of the 19th century. By that time, photography and its popularity had reached a point where scenes of everyday work and life began to be recorded, for interest's sake alone and also for souvenir picture postcards which visitors to Shetland could send back home to show what life on Shetland outwith the towns was like. These first decades of the 1900s were when most work was still done manually. Such equipment and machinery as it existed was primitive. Scenes of peat-cutting, knitting, laundry, kishie-making, bird and egg collecting, Shetland ponies, horizontal mills, winnowing, ploughing, Shetland shawls and more feature.