Last fall, just a few days into my trip to the Shetland Islands, the Scottish subarctic archipelago across the sea from Norway, I found myself on the top of a cliff face, peering through the fog at a huge rock in the northern Atlantic Ocean. The rock was topped with a spike of white: the Muckle Flugga lighthouse, built in 1854, a mind-boggling feat as the rock’s cliff face juts straight up out of the roiling sea. In the early days of the lighthouse, our tour guide told us, men had to be hoisted by ropes around their arms to safely cross the gap between their boat and the landing area on the rock. At this most northerly point in the U.K, I felt a profound sense that I was very far from home.

I had disembarked to this spot from a bus at the very top of the tiny island of Unst, the most northern and rocky of the Shetland Islands, with a population of about 600. On the bus with me was a group of mostly women from all over the world, all of us attendees of Shetland Wool Week, a knitting and textile festival hailed through the world’s knitting grapevine as the mecca of all knitting and textile festivals.

To get to this spot, the bus had driven us up the length of “mainland” Shetland, the largest of the 16 populated islands, then crossed on a ferry to the smaller island of Yell, then driven up a snaking road to Yell’s tip and to a second ferry ride (this one on more of a raft than a boat, the bus exposed on all sides) to the island of Unst.