About as close to Norway as it is to mainland Scotland, Skaw Cottage on the island of Unst has long been recognised as the most northerly house in the UK. As a result, Amazon thinks this is a good enough reason for us to want to pay £4.99 for a 10×8 photograph of it!

Image credit: Flickr

The picture itself is no more interesting to look at than the little factoid that goes with it. There’s the same undulating scrubland as in every other photo of the Shetlands, a one-way road with a few cottages at the end of it, and a strip of North Sea in the background. It’s quite pretty, although dare we say, not the most immediately eye-grabbing scene ever.

Home owners in the area can look forward to a Winter during which there may be no more than 5 hours of day light a day. The weather is known to change at the drop of a hat, though you are guaranteed at least some rain on 285 days out of each year.

However, we have been saving the best piece of Skaw trivia until last: it’s no longer the most northerly house in Britain. When the RAF closed the Saxa Vord radar station (Britain’s most northerly, of course) in 2006, work quickly began on converting the remaining buildings into the “Saxa Vord Resort”. As of April 2007 visitors can stay in any one of its 20 “self-catering holiday homes“. A close comparison of the co-ordinates places Saxa Vord a good 5.62 latitudinal seconds or two hundred metres further North, robbing Skaw of its centuries-old title and making it “almost the most northerly house in Britain”.

OK, if you’re being picky Saxa Vord is not a year-round residential house, but it’s certainly the most northerly sheltered place in Britain. Also, being perhaps a little fairer on Skaw, where else in the UK are you as likely to be able to watch the Northern Lights from your front window? A brief online property search on Gartoo for property in Unst find very reasonably priced some four-bedroom houses, surrounded by a few acres of land. Some going for “offers over £205,000”. Moreover, whilst admitting that the locals may be “a little more reserved than you’re used to”, Shetland.org notes that “the thing that people value most of all is the strength and warmth of the community.” With the competition over who’s the most northerly out of the way, and after viewing a few more photos like the one above, the Shetland isles might begin to sound rather lovely, really.