Administrative Boundary of Shetland Islands

About Shetland Islands

Shetland Islands is a council area comprising a subarctic archipelago roughly 170 kilometres north of the Scottish mainland — closer to Bergen in Norway than to Edinburgh. Covering approximately 1,468 square kilometres across around 100 islands, of which 16 are inhabited, Shetland had a population of approximately 23,000 at the 2022 Census, with Lerwick as its only town of significant size. Jarlshof and Mousa Broch Jarlshof, at the southern tip of Mainland Shetland, is one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in Britain: continuous occupation from around 2500 BC through the Bronze Age, Iron Age, Pictish, Norse, and medieval periods left superimposed layers of settlement — including Bronze Age houses, an Iron Age broch and wheelhouses, and a Norse longhouse — that were only exposed by storm erosion in the late 19th century. Mousa Broch, on the small island of Mousa, is the best-preserved Iron Age broch tower anywhere in Scotland and stands almost 13 metres tall, its double-skinned dry-stone walls still enclosing an intact internal staircase some 2,000 years after construction. Up Helly Aa and North Sea Oil Up Helly Aa, held in Lerwick on the last Tuesday of January each year, is the largest of Shetland's fire festivals: several hundred costumed "guizers," led by a Guizer Jarl dressed as a Viking chieftain, parade a replica Viking longship through the town by torchlight before ceremonially burning it, a tradition dating to the 1880s that fuses Victorian revivalism with Shetland's Norse heritage. Since the 1970s Shetland has also been central to Britain's North Sea oil industry: the Sullom Voe Terminal, opened in 1981, is one of Europe's largest oil and gas terminals, and the associated disturbance payments and Shetland Charitable Trust funded by the oil industry have shaped the islands' modern infrastructure and public services. Shetland ponies, one of the smallest native pony breeds in the world, remain closely associated with the islands. GIS and Boundary Data The administrative boundary of Shetland Islands Council is available for free download in GeoJSON and KML formats, sourced from the OS Open Geography portal (Crown copyright 2024). Compatible with QGIS, ArcGIS, Mapbox, and Google Earth, the dataset supports archaeological research, Norse cultural heritage mapping, energy infrastructure planning, and demographic analysis across the Shetland Islands council area.

📍 Administrative boundary of Shetland Islands county