Travel: In the bleak midwinter: On the shortest day of the year, Simon Calder took the high road to Shetland and Frank Barrett took the low road to the Scillies, as Britain's extremities made ready for Christmas

The pilot performed what felt like a three-point turn. We were no longer on collision course with the churning North Sea, but ducking and weaving past some vicious-looking jabs of granite. The aircraft seemed to be travelling sideways as we made robust contact with the ground, but none of the other passengers appeared to be concerned. Welcome to Shetland.

This was my first visit to an inset. Maps of Britain show Shetland stuck in a little box at the top right-hand side, making it impossible to tell how far the islands are from anywhere or, indeed, how big. The islands, with a population of 22,500, start about 100 miles north-east of Cape Wrath, on the northern tip of Scotland, and straggle northwards for another 70 miles. The largest is called Mainland; just south of its centre is the capital, Lerwick. From the bottom tip juts Sumburgh Airport, where we had just landed.

Shetland is one of those rare places that sounds less appealing the more you find out about it. If you ask for tourist information, the literature arrives with a letter from the chief executive. His suggestions on 'the best times to visit' end abruptly in October. At last month's World Travel Market - an event where every country, from Croatia to Lebanon, purports to constitute the best of all possible worlds - the Shetland representative counselled against a midwinter visit.

Each December day on the islands is blessed by an average of only 24 minutes of sunshine. The local Met Office said travel delays due to bad weather were unlikely over Christmas, but predicted 'lumpy rain'.

The prospect of a journey to the far north of Britain on the eve of the shortest day of the year was dismal.

Shetland is the only part of the British Isles above 60 degrees north: more than two-thirds of the way from the Equator to the North Pole, and farther north than the southern tip of Greenland. Visitors should be greeted by a big 'No through road' sign as soon as they step off the plane. But I pressed deeper into this cul-de-sac of an archipelago by hitching a ride with a gentleman called Cary Douglas (I managed not to ask if he had a friend called Kirk Grant).

Almost at once, we had to stop at traffic lights: vehicles on the main A970 road are obliged to stop to allow aircraft to take off. As I tried to adjust to that concept, Mr Douglas pointed out where the Braer ran aground on 5 January this year. Though the tanker is still somewhere beneath the waves, the violent weather that wrecked her also helped to clear the oil.

My impromptu tour continued with the sight of a Russian industrial estate floating in a broad voe (the Shetland version of a fiord). These vessels are called Klondykers - huge factory ships that moor in Shetland waters to buy fish for immediate processing. The treasure they seek is herring and mackerel, known as 'silver gold'. Each ship is packed with hundreds of workers, who live for months in the bays around Shetland. Crew members come ashore frequently, where they are made welcome - though one shopkeeper has a sign in Russian, warning of the presence of a security camera. It is said that some Russians sell duty-free liquor at pounds 5 a litre: vodka galore this Christmas.

As he guided the car around the magnificently crumpled terrain, Mr Douglas told me he was from Aberdeen, and asked my provenance. Crawley, I admitted. He declared that we were both 'South Mouthers', despite our disparate origins. This local term applies to any incomer, all of whom are deemed to have arrived by steamer at the South Mouth of Lerwick Harbour.

The Shetland dialect is beguiling but baffling. Scandinavians colonised the islands from the 9th to the 15th centuries, and a smattering of Norse has survived and blended with Scots and English. The dialect is bestowed with some delightful nuances: gurblottit means 'unwashed', and wanrestit translates as 'bereft of sleep'. Morn's day is the eloquent expression for 'tomorrow'.

The journey from home had taken eight hours. I felt thoroughly gurblottit and wanrestit, and the morn's day - albeit as short as a British day can be - promised to be busy. So I found a room at an inn and tried to sleep through what sounded like a random selection of sound-effects discs played simultaneously at high volume. The wind cried Merry Christmas, while hail battered the window. Lumpy rain, indeed.

Anyone with a poetic penchant for seeing the dawn, but a disposition towards late rising, will adore Shetland in midwinter. Daybreak melted the darkness at about the same moment as the heat from my toast persuaded the Lurpak to liquefy. The sky began mounting a spectacular show well before eight, even though the tardy sun was not due to haul itself over the horizon until 9.08.

This early light revealed a town hardly obsessed with the impending festival. A few fairy lights glimmered among the much more macho lamps of the harbour. I tuned in to the local commercial radio station, SIBC, and was greeted by a litany of 'Christmas classifieds'. 'Avoid disappointment] Bring your laundry and dry cleaning in plenty of time. Lerwick Laundry closed 25-28 December.' 'Are you looking for binoculars? Look no further] Call in and see the large selection of binoculars available at R W Bayes.' I eluded the remainder of the Yuletide monologue and caught my first gasp of freezing air. Though there was still an hour until sunrise, the aerial scenery was spectacularly busy, with clouds crowding each other out of the sky. Imagine a fluffy version of the Alps. Enough light was seeping from the heavens to allow an initial exploration, so I eased a borrowed car timidly northwards.

Shetland is never less than majestic, and this bitter day bestowed upon it an alluring edge of menace. Solemn curves of moorland, gently dusted with snow, rose up from the sea. (Nowhere on the islands, the locals are pleased to remind you, is more than three miles from the sea.) Inland, steely grey lochs of gleaming serenity litter the landscape. Gulls swerve elegantly through the ghostly sheen.

The experience was like driving through a superior selection of Christmas cards. And there, by the edge of the North Sea, lay a pretty little chapel. A hundred pairs of eyes stared as I trudged through the snow to the oldest church on Shetland. Lunna Kirk was built 240 years ago and has taken a beating from the weather. Christmas has not been celebrated here for decades, its roofless

shell these days serving as a shelter for sheep - which regarded their midwinter visitor with suspicion.

My retreating footprints froze instantly. In this pitiless climate, it was difficult to entertain the notion of 'visitor attractions', but there were other places I was anxious to see. One was the the village of Hillswick, where the main road expires.

Somewhere along the way, the sun rose (officially, at least) - and it suddenly became dark. The snow-blighted hillsides blackened and merged with the sea and the sky, which began to expel a blast of sleet and hail - sideways, at 50mph. If you want a good definition of the word 'bleak', drive north on the A970 on 21 December. I kept right on to the end of the road, but only just. The shadow of the St Magnus Bay Hotel loomed out of the blizzard, and I huddled in for coffee.

'I don't recall a day as bad as this,' was the discomfiting comment from the hotel proprietor. Peter Titcomb is an incomer, and so too is the hotel: - a timber structure it had been floated around up the west coast from Glasgow in pieces, and reassembled on a this remote headland. Seventy people are booked for Christmas lunch, though goodness knows where they will emerge from.

There was nowhere to go but back. The sky lightened a little, and I swear I caught a glimpse of the edge of a rainbow, manipulating a few maverick rays of sunshine far off over the Atlantic. At the narrow neck of land called Mavis Grind, the ocean is separated from the North Sea by just 100 yards. The bodies of water looked equally forbidding. A sign warns of 'Otters crossing', but none had ventured out on midwinter's day.

At noon it was getting colder, and the Met men said there was more to come. The day had begun at three degrees above freezing, but by now the temperature had dipped below zero. Exposed to the wind - which they described, with some economy, as a 'fresh' north-westerly - I was chilled to the bone and beyond. Sustenance was called for.

While Shetland's newer hotels resemble halls of residence for students at the University of Suffering, the Busta House Hotel is a 16th-century laird's home with many open fireplaces, a friendly ghost and a good line in local salmon.

Flickering continuously on the horizon is the flame of waste gases burning from the chimney of Sullom Voe oil terminal. The biggest oil terminal in Europe has brought wealth to Shetland, and to thousands of South Mouthers - but many aspects of island life remain unaffected.

At the village of Voe, for example, I came across an ancient store called T M Adie's, proclaiming itself as dealing in General Merchandise, Tweeds and Hosiery. (It doubles as the post office.)

I had been asked to investigate the local retail scene (back in London, the names Paco Rabanne XS, Mortal Kombat and Swatch Turbo seemed to represent the most ubiquitous of Christmas gifts). At Adie's I was able to make an early purchase of an item on the Independent shopping list, shown in full overleaf: the eight Ferrero Rocher chocolates, ambitiously priced at pounds 2.50.

My shopping spree continued in the capital. The Esplanade twists along the Lerwick waterfront, while the town rises steeply from the waterside. The islanders' allegiances are evident in the street names: I do not recall a Scottish King Erik, but he has a road named after him, as have Olaf and Harald.

The story of life above 60 degrees (latitude, of course - rarely temperature) is traced at the Lerwick Museum. Neolithic tools from three millennia before the birth of Christ are on display, and a 1,000-year-old Viking brooch, fashioned to a clumsy elegance in solid silver. You learn, too, that a geological fault that slices straight through Shetland from top to bottom is an extension of the Great Glen fault that almost lops the top off the Scottish mainland.

Shetland's history has been shaped by the sea, and one local boy helped to change the course of modern shipping. Arthur Anderson, founder of the P & O Line, was born in Lerwick. Although its liners no longer steam to the Iberian peninsula and the Orient, a P & O ferry plies nightly between Lerwick and Aberdeen. Mr Anderson spent part of his fortune on housing the poor in neat Victorian cottages, whose building-block frontages appear to have been built from an especially robust form of Lego.

Christmas in Shetland a century ago was a moveable feast. In 1893, Christmas Day coincided with the departure of the weekly ship to Aberdeen, so the celebrations festivities that year were unceremoniously shifted to 26 December. No such fate faces Santa in 1993.

If the book-buying and borrowing trends in Lerwick are anything to go by, the people of Shetland will, in sharp contrast to the rebellious folk of Scilly, be reading The Downing Street Years by Margaret Thatcher, the most popular book on the islands. While eating Christmas dinner, they will watch Alive] (the film about people eating other people in the Andes), the most popular rental from the Cellar Video Hire and Liquor Store. The kids will be playing Mortal Kombat, while trying to offload unwanted copies of Mr Blobby's Christmas No 1 ('We've sold loads, but no one's actually bought it for themselves,' one record dealer told me).

Shetland appears to be a Swatch-free zone: Stanley Swanson's was offering a pounds 14.99 Tickers watch instead. Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy has sold out throughout the islands, but Jacob's Creek Southeastern Australian Red 1991 is on sale at the Wine Shop - as are another 43 Australian wines.

The aftershave was a problem; I almost had to settle for a presentation pack of Old Spice with a free pair of boxer shorts, but (fortunately for my Dad) I found some Paco Rabanne XS at A L Laing's Druggist store.

Up the slope beside the shop, a notice in Russian points to the Norwegian Seamen's Mission. It has been converted into a 'House of Hope' for the workers on the factory ships. Over Christmas, a Christian mission is providing free coffee and snooker.

This part of town is called Market Cross. The monument in the middle, from which it takes its name, at present has the companionship of the only tree I saw in the whole trip: a Christmas fir that had shed most of its needles. The locals say trees find it hard to endure the sea-spray, but I blame the dreadful piped music: tree and shoppers were being assailed by singalong versions of old Cliff Richard hits. Judging by the noise from tinny loudspeakers, wailing has replaced whaling as a local occupation.

I went along to Clive's Record Shop to find out if this racket was representative of the islanders' tastes. The assistant proffered the latest Elton John CD, and - in an impressive piece of switch-selling - flogged me Shetland's bestseller, a CD called Crude by the local band, Bongshang. Not only have the musicians fashioned a witty and energetic fusion of technology and Celtic music, but they have also managed to escape any Norwegian sub-Eurovision influences. And the CD is sufficiently esoteric for my brother's tastes.

Had the sun elected to show its face, there would have been a satisfying symmetry in watching it rise in the present capital, Lerwick, on the east coast, and set in the former capital, Scalloway, on the west coast. Main Street, Scalloway, is rather more attractive than the average main street. A ribbon of diminutive cottages is supported at one end by the vigour and colour of the fishing harbour, and at the other by the gaunt shadow of Scalloway Castle. Much of that building's opulence has vanished, as has the roof, but the arrogant twirls of its turrets convey a certain theatricality. Above it, a half- moon preened as understudy for the indisposed sun.

At three minutes to three, a barrage of hail drove horizontally through the town. Sunset on the winter solstice was due at two minutes to three. Five seconds after this non-event, I ran for cover. And suddenly it became light. 'Don't like the weather?' they are (too) fond of saying in Shetland. 'Don't worry - it'll change in a minute.' This particular transition saw the hail hurtle off, revealing a huge, blue sky and flares of gold from the setting sun. I called the Met Office. The temperature had continued its slide below zero - but not a sign of any of the promised 24 minutes of sunshine. A sun-seeker's only option is the solarium at Lerwick swimming pool, though pounds 2.75 buys only 20 minutes on the sun bed.

Enough light lingered to permit a boat trip from Lerwick harbour to the barren island of Bressay. The journey took just five minutes, and offered a fine view of the capital rising, with its enticing array of lights, from the shore into the hills.

My favourite Shetland term is dayset, a neat alternative to 'evening'. For a town of 10,000, augmented by a few entrepreneurial Klondykers, dayset in Lerwick is impressively lively. I crawled from one pub to the next, forsaking the menu at the Candlestick Maker bistro - venison steak or turkey lasagne - for fresh haddock at the Queen's Hotel.

I arrived late at the liveliest place in town, the Ferry Inn. Most of the patrons had clearly enjoyed a long evening, the juke box uniting them in a chanting sway. Midwinter madness ended at 11pm, when the landlord turned off the lights. And we drifted off into the longest night of 1993.

(Photographs, table and map omitted)