| THEIR nearest railway station is Bergen, in Norway, and their Bishop is 200 miles away in Aberdeen & Orkney. St Colman’s, in Burravoe, on the island of Yell, is the northernmost Anglican church in the UK. Its priest, the Revd Keith Henshall (below centre), is located an hour to the south on Shetland’s mainland, at the Scottish Episcopal St Magnus’s, but he gets to Yell as often as he can.
When I spoke to him, he had just been negotiating heavy snow on his way back from a well-attended Mothering Sunday service at St Colman’s — the sort of family service attended by almost the whole community, together with regular members of the congregation.
He will go again on Wednesday of Holy Week for a Bible study, and stay overnight to celebrate the Maundy Thursday eucharist before returning to Lerwick. On Good Friday, St Colman’s will be open all day (no fears about security on the island) for people to drop in for prayer and meditation, and they will decorate the church on Saturday for the Easter celebration.
Two of the congregation, Bill Underwood and James Whitworth, have written in their diocesan paper, Northern Light, about the hard year it has been for the crofters of Yell, with foot-and-mouth restrictions, and the culling of 16,000 healthy lambs and ewes to prevent their starving on the hillside in the winter.
Surely, the writers say, the meat could have been distributed, even if only to hospitals, care homes, or families on low incomes, which would have “eased the heartbreak of the hard-working struggling crofters”. But, despite the stress, they don’t give up. Even the people who have lived there all their lives never take the peace and quiet for granted.
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