Shapinsay- Island Interview

As part of our Featured Island Interview series we interviewed Lisa Marie Muir, Manager and Community Development Officer of Shapinsay Development Trust. Lisa Marie discusses life on the island, including its strong community spirit, sustainable initiatives like electric cars, and efforts by the Development Trust to tackle housing shortages and support young families.

Could we start off by just telling me a bit more about yourself? Have you always lived in Orkney?

Always lived in Orkney, yes. I started off in Westray and moved to Shapinsay when I was 18.

I’ve now spent more of my life in Shapinsay than I did in Westray, but I’ve always been in Orkney and Orkney will always be home.

Was there a reason that you moved to Shapinsay?

 I married a Shapinsay man. So cheesy to say that it was love that brought me here, but yes, essentially that.

What are your connections to mainland like and to the rest of Orkney?

It’s probably the most connected island to the mainland of Orkney because we’ve got six ferries a day and then the Trust run another service at night.

So just a passenger only service for up to 10 people once a night. So that means that you can get to Kirkwall right up till nine/half nine at night. The one that goes at the weekends, it’s half 10, 11 o’clock. We try to keep it flexible. We are much more connected than most of the other isles that get like two ferries a day, three in the summer. We’re very lucky.

So how does the one ran by the Trust work?

So it only goes if there’s bookings for it. So we’ve got a booking clerk and even if there is only a booking for one person it will go.

And you can book to go or come back from Kirkwall. It runs for one person or up to ten people and we just charge £8.50. It costs us a lot more than that so it’s heavily subsidised by the trust. That was the priority for the funding when the turbine went up- transport and especially opening up Shapinsay so that we could all do things in the evenings. It opens us to be able to go to evening classes, work in the evenings or for kids to go to afterschool events, sports, las well as socialising.

It’s more like an extension of Kirkwall than it used to be.

And how long is that journey?

It’s just 20/25 minutes on the ferry and then the small charter 15/20.

And that’s off the back of your turbine?

I think I’ll be lying if I told you the date, but I think it was 2011 that the turbine went up and the main focus for that was to cover transport costs, we do use it for a lot more obviously, because we’ve got income coming in. It opens up a whole world of other funding that we can attract because we’ve got the match funding there already. It makes it a lot easier to turn a pound into a few pounds if you’ve got the pound in the first place.

Is there any other projects the Trust have been working on?

The Trust is focused heavily on housing at the minute. There is a shortage of housing across Orkney but especially in the Isles and what we’re finding is that people come here to retire. They want to get away from the hustle and bustle of the big cities and they’re coming up to Orkney, to the Isles, where it’s quiet, which is lovely, but it means that we have to work really hard to attract working age and young families.

We’ve got two family homes already, another one just about to be complete and we hopefully have a family moving into that in December. Then we’ve got another three houses that we are in the process of trying to get planning permission.

The focus is on the elderly or people with accessibility needs so that A- they can stay here longer and B- it might free up property on the island. If you have an elderly person living in a home that’s no longer suitable, then it can go on the market or the Trust might be able to buy it/rent it out. In turn that opens up other housing to encourage more folk to come and live here.

We are also planning some serviced plots that we’d sell for a nominal sum, but there’d be a burden on it so that if that young person was to ever decide to sell the house, we would get the value of the site back or first refusal on purchase. That’s the long-term plan.

Other things- we’ve got the Smithy cafe that we opened last year.

That’s been a focus for a while and obviously will continue to be a focus as we run it and adapt it to suit the needs of the community. It’s made a huge impact on Shapinsay because we had nowhere for visitors to go while The Smithy was closed and nowhere for locals to meet, no café and no pub. It previously had closed before Covid and didn’t reopen. On top of that, we’ve just opened our charity shop this year.

What is the housing situation in Shapinsay?

The price of the houses from when we first moved here to where they’re going now is crazy and then you’ve got the added issue then that your cost to build in the Isles is so much higher. That’s where I think the Development Trust must come in because we can attract funding to build houses or to renovate houses that we can then either rent out or we’re looking at options like shared ownership.

Is it mainly new builds that you’re looking or retrofitting?

The three homes that we’ve completed are all retrofit/renovation projects. We’re currently looking to see if the council will let us knock down an old shepherd’s cottage and replace it like for like, so that it’s still in keeping with the area and looks much the same as it did, but more modern.

Then the next four ‘projects’ are new builds which will be the first time we have tackled a project like this, should hopefully be easier than the retrofit- having straight walls is a good start.

Do you have like lots of second homes or even just empty homes?

The empty homes tend to be old stone cottages that are very small and probably aren’t that feasible to renovate. There are a few empty homes but it’s not a huge issue here in Shapinsay, 21 in total, either second homes used for holidays, or sitting empty without tenants.

What’s your population in Shapinsay?

Population at the census was 299, it fluctuates a little and there have been a few folk come and go, but still around the 300 mark.

Would you say you’ve had an increase in population?

No, it’s stayed pretty level. However the school roll has dropped massively this last while. We’re just losing ones to the Grammar School and then there’s not the young ones coming up. We’ve had to drop to one teacher school for the first time ever.

It’s one of the things that we’ve been trying to tackle, encouraging young families with primary age kids to come here. If you lose the school, you lose your community.

Has a tunnels project been discussed to replace the ferries?

The OIC did a feasibility study on tunnels around 10 years ago, it came back as 80 million and they decided it wasn’t something they could tackle at that time. I think that figure would very likely be doubled and doubled again by now, so I think it will be ferries for the foreseeable. Very soon after that we had to replace a two million pound water pipe across the string and a replacement electricity cable.

Do you think it would make a big difference to life in Shapinsay?

Everybody’s got very mixed opinions. And there’s a lot of people that have come here to live because they are cut off from the rest of society and therefore don’t want it. I personally am keen, we’d love to stay here, retire here in the home we built, but realistically, without the tunnel, my other half’s job might mean we need to think about leaving when, if we had a tunnel, we wouldn’t even consider it.

I think it would open up Shapinsay and make it more viable to live here, the shop would be more popular and the school. I think the schools in Kirkwall are busy enough that I actually think some people from the Shapinsay side of Kirkwall might come here and then people would come here and live because Kirkwall’s more accessible.

Kirkwall itself is maybe only a mile and a half away. I think some of our residents are worried that we would just become a suburb of Kirkwall and you’d get a lot of boy racers, crime and things like that. But I personally think, in terms of future sustainability of the islands, it’s the future. Look at the Pharoes and Norway!

If you didn’t start with Shapinsay to Kirkwall and instead you started with going north and joining up the isles first, then you stop Kirkwall from becoming the centre of the universe. If you joined up, say, Eday to the north end of Shapinsay and then joined Westray to Eday and Papa Westray to Westray and Stronsay to Eday and Sandy to Stronsay.

If you connected some of the isles, then suddenly the hotels, shops and local businesses, they suddenly become viable because you’ve got more people using them and only then you join Shapinsay to Kirkwall.

And yes, everybody’s going to come through Shapinsay to get to Kirkwall. But you’ve suddenly made the isles a more viable place to be.

We have three linked isles in Orkney and they still have their own sense of identity and a really strong sense of community within those spaces that you wouldn’t lose just because you’re connected to somewhere else. It just means that your businesses flourish due to more people and easier import and export of goods. The isles would be more attractive to live on and your schools can just thrive a wee bit better because you’re not relying on the ferry.

The ferries are so expensive and they’ve just started this rolling programme to replace them, but they’re going to have to start again at the very beginning the minute they get to the end to stop the same issues from happening, where we’ve got nearly 40 year old ferries that are at risk of breaking down every day.

The solution would be to start the tunnel process, but the Orkney Islands Council –  want to sort the ferry issue first. Tunnels will take decades, even if they did go down that route, they need ferries now as the fleet is aged and in dire need of replacement.

Is your ferry service reliable?

Shapinsay is only 25 minutes away from Kirkwall. There is a quite a tough stretch of water to cross but generally we’re quite lucky and you would get at least one or two sailings a day even on a rough day. There is no flight service so we are completely reliant on the ferry though. We’re lucky to be so close, it means we get 6 return sailings in a day, which makes Shapinsay that bit more accessible.

Can you describe some of your sustainability projects?

In terms of vehicles, we run a car service with three electric cars. Originally one was provided through the tax relief that you get for an electric vehicle and leased to us from our renewables subsidiary. The other one was provided through Community Energy Scotland and it’s a converted wheelchair vehicle.

The feedback from the community at that time was that they were both too high for anybody with mobility issues. So we then got the Kia Niro through the tax relief on the turbine. So we have three vehicle, one is a seven seater, one is a wheelchair converted and one is accessible. But we’re looking at getting a combi van, so we’ll get rid of the seven seater then.

And how does it work, does anyone rent/lease and drive them?

No, we put it with a driver. We don’t have it as a self-driving thing yet and it is operated as a donation service. Everybody’s just asked to donate what they can and it’s like a taxi service basically running five days a week. And then we have six electric bikes and an electric trike that are available for hire on the island.

We try and encourage tourists to use them in the summertime. And then we’ve got 21 electric bikes on long-term hire for Islanders to have. The first lot were for commuting and then the second lot were for wellbeing.

We’re also working on our climate action plan at the minute, and we’re working with Community Energy Scotland on Community Energy Hub expert community of practice on transport as well.

So we’re sort of looking at our whole transport set up and what we could do better, what other people can learn from us and find out what we can learn from other people and putting together a transport strategy.

So, that’s taking up a bit of time at the minute and we’re also getting solar panels on our office building for the charity shop, the office building, the bike shed and the electric car. We’re always looking at sustainability and we are coming towards the end of the life of our turbines so we have to take that into consideration, in more ways than one, we have money as long as the turbine’s there, but as soon as that stops, then we have no income stream.

That’s one of the reasons we’re trying to do as much housing now, so that we have an income stream more long term. It should allow us to keep our basic services going beyond the life of the turbine. We’re focusing heavily on how we making everything we do more sustainable.  The charity shop for example, 50% of everything that comes in goes right back into the project, cover wages and overheads. And then 50% goes out to the community groups that get involved with it. We also need to look at making sure that the transport side of things is as sustainable as we can, community transport is expensive but we need to ensure we are making the best of our car service and our boat service every year.

And once that turbine reaches its lifespan, is it a case of just looking to replace it?

We are looking into this and the feasibility. The issue is that nobody’s making that size of turbines anymore. They’re all making ones three times that size.

We can’t put up a turbine three times that size. Everything is just set up for that size of turbine we currently have and we can’t go any bigger than that. So, unless there’s somebody out there that is willing to take on replacing that size of turbines, then we have to rethink. Do we try go for it or do we scrap it altogether and look at other ways to create revenue.

All options are being considered at the moment, to be honest we just don’t know yet what the future holds.

Do you have a crofting community in Shapinsay?

Orkney doesn’t tend to be so strongly crofting community, not in the way Shetland is with common grazing etc, there are smaller crofts, but it tends to be slightly bigger family farms. Shapinsay was in the past run by a laird, David Balfour and he completely overhauled and squared off all the fields which have then been split it into these slightly bigger farms.

 How long have you worked for the Trust?

Four years.

In terms of workforce in Shapinsay, do you all juggle a couple of different roles within the island?

I started as manager at Shapinsay Development Trust four years ago, and then started as Community Development Officer and manager three years ago.

Four years ago, I also started as a community first responder as well as the relief bus driver, which was a lot at that time, I gave up my fitness instructor role at that time as it was too much!. That was five jobs when I started. My husband, he’s just changed jobs, but he was a self-employed joiner on the island and a retained firefighter. Most people do two or three or more jobs.

Part of it is needing to do that to boost your income to be a full-time job. And part of it is just that somebody’s got to do the job, so we fill the roles to make sure they continue.

There are fewer and fewer working age on the island, so you just take on more and more, it’s the same with the volunteers. You just find that it’s the same people volunteering for this and that and it’s really hard to avoid volunteer fatigue.

Are you quite sociable in Shapinsay, or do you get the ferry over to Kirkwall quite a lot?

There’s quite a lot of social events happening here and we’ve got a well-being coordinator.

Alisons main role is to create things to encourage people to come together for their own wellbeing. So she’s doing a lot of social things like the community cafe and the well-being walk. She’s also just started a creative sessions where people go and play music or read poetry or tell stories and lots of other small social events.

We’ve also got a great agricultural association- (Shapinsay Agricultural Association) and they run the Shapinsay show. And they’ll do either a ploughing match or stockjudging most years.

We’ve also got the lifeboat guild that organises a few events in the year.

There’s quite a lot of things on Shapinsay. You don’t have to leave to have a social life and we’ve got the pub two nights a week. There’s a quiz night on this week for the first time.

Do you get quite a lot of tourists?

We get a lot of day trippers because Shapinsay is so easy to get to. Very few overnighters as we’ve only have one proper self-catering place to stay. We would like at some point to get a campsite or glamping pods so that people do have the option for a cheap overnight stay. People that come here don’t tend to do more than one or two nights because they want to get to all the other isles. But we’ve certainly seen an increase in tourism since we opened the cafe again.

We’ve got a brilliant play park here so people come over with their kids and they’ll either take a picnic, go to park or café and just make a day of it. Most of the things that there are for people to see on Shapinsay are within walking distance, so they will pop over on foot or hire a bike to see a bit more, it’s great for that.

Were you set on staying in Shapinsay to raise your family?

Yes that’s the main reason we stayed here as long as we have, because we wanted to bring our kids up with the Island lifestyle as we’re both isles bairns. Isles life is different, even different to Kirkwall, they have so much more freedom.

They’re not exposed to the same pressures of society and it’s been great for them growing up. This was the best environment for them as bairns and I’d highly recommend it for growing up, we have a great primary school here too!

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