Why the Northern Isles feel Norse

Arrive in Lerwick on the overnight ferry and the first thing you notice is the light — low, silver, restless — and the second is the names on street signs and shopfronts: Voe, Ness, Gaet, Sound. Orkney and Shetland were settled by Scandinavians from around the eighth century, and the islands stayed under Norwegian, then Danish, rule until the fifteenth century. That is a very long time. Long enough for the landscape to be renamed from end to end.

Norn, the Norse language of the islands, lingered in Shetland into the eighteenth century and survives today in hundreds of dialect words: peerie for small, muckle for big, bonxie for the great skua that chases you off the hills. You do not need to be a specialist to see the inheritance. You need a map, decent boots and a willingness to slow down.

Reading the map: Norse place names

Place names are the cheapest archaeology there is. Buy a 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey map of any island and start decoding.

• -bister, -ster from bólstaðr, a farm or steading: Kirkabister, Busta, Swinister.
• quoy from kví, a cattle fold: Quoyloo, Quoys, and dozens more.
• geo from gjá, a narrow inlet — the cliffs are riddled with them.
• voe from vágr, a bay; firth and sound need no translation.
• Papa from papar, the priests: Papa Westray, Papa Stour.
• Ting from þing, an assembly: Tingwall in both island groups.

Some names hide their origins beautifully. Lerwick is Leirvík, the clay bay. Kirkwall is Kirkjuvagr, church bay. Scalloway is Skálavágr, bay of the halls, and Hoy simply means high island. Stand at the old assembly site at Tingwall on a still day and you are standing where Norse law was spoken aloud.

Archaeology you can walk through

Few places in Britain let you step inside the Norse world so easily. On Orkney, Maeshowe is a Neolithic tomb famously graffiti'd by twelfth-century crusaders, who left the largest collection of runic inscriptions in the country — you visit by guided tour only, so book ahead. The Brough of Birsay is a tidal island reached by a causeway: check the tide tables before you cross, because the remains of Pictish and Norse settlement, including an earl's church and halls, deserve more than a hurried ten minutes.

In Shetland, Jarlshof near Sumburgh stacks Norse longhouses on top of Bronze Age and Iron Age dwellings in one windswept site. Mousa Broch is the finest surviving Iron Age tower in Scotland, later reused by Norse settlers, and on summer nights storm petrels flutter around it like bats. On Sanday, the Scar boat burial, excavated in 1991, gave up a Viking grave complete with a woman, a man, a child, a boat and a fine whalebone ironing board.

Two more to note: Cubbie Roo's Castle on Wyre, one of the earliest stone castles in Scotland, raised in the twelfth century; and St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, begun in 1137 by Earl Rognvald Kolsson and still built of warm red sandstone.

Museums worth a wet afternoon

Weather will interrupt your plans at some point, and that is a good thing. The county museum in Kirkwall, housed in a seventeenth-century townhouse behind the cathedral, holds Viking grave goods, runic carvings and finds from Scar. On the Lerwick waterfront, the Shetland Museum and Archives pairs a superb boat hall with Up Helly Aa costumes, textiles and an archive room that will keep family historians happily busy for hours. Smaller heritage centres on Unst and in Scalloway fill in the local detail, including a replica longship on Unst that gives a real sense of scale.

Living heritage: fire, fiddle and dialect

Norse heritage here is not only excavated; it is performed. Up Helly Aa in Lerwick takes place on the last Tuesday of January, when hundreds of torch-carrying guizers process through the town and burn a galley — a Victorian invention, but one that borrowed deliberately from the Norse past. Country parishes hold their own versions through February, and accommodation books up a year in advance.

Fiddle music, story-telling and dialect carry the same thread. Listen for words like tystie, spoots and kirk, and you are hearing the shadow of a language that once ran the whole length of these islands.

Practical notes for planning a trip

• Travel overnight by ferry from Aberdeen to Lerwick, or fly into Sumburgh or Kirkwall; inter-island ferries and flights then open up the smaller islands.
• Hire a car early for summer travel, and learn single-track etiquette: use passing places, and wave.
• Pack for four seasons in one day — windproof layers, waterproofs, midge repellent for still evenings and long trousers for rough grass where ticks live.
• Book guided tours at Maeshowe and any popular site well in advance, and always check tide times for causeway crossings such as Birsay and St Ninian's Isle.

Give yourself a week if you can. Two or three days in each island group lets you wander a beach, read a few headstones, spend an unhurried hour in a museum and still catch the last of the evening light over a voe. That is when the Northern Isles stop being a history lesson and start feeling like somewhere you might, quite happily, stay.