Site in Focus - The Meal Roads

We have embarked on our year long project for 2025, recording as much as possible of the remaining meal roads in Shetland.

The meal roads were a form of famine relief in the late 1840s and early 1850s where local labour was used to create a network of roads in areas of Shetland that were unconnected by any form of real road network. In return, participants – many mere children – were paid most frequently with meal to help feed their families.

There is a rather surprising number of such roads still in existence, largely made up of fragments, often grass covered. Others show as tarmacked remnants of WWII era road modernisation. The bulk of the original meal roads, though, have been subsumed by the road network of the oil boom era, the roads we use today.

Our initial outing from The Brig to the roadside quarry in Housetter, Northmavine, revealed the previous bridge, which may go back to the meal road era (albeit with later efforts to minimise erosion), drainage channels, the cambered base of the road and the Herculean effort of a half-starving people to get a little food.