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Tuesday 30 April 2013

A-Z Challenge - Z is for Zetland & Zell am See

Join me on his A-Z journey  into  A SENSE OF PLACE with reminiscences on places that are connected with my family history or are part of my own personal memories.


Z IF FOR:


ZETLAND  - the old name for the Shetland Isles, the northern most isles of Scotland, situated 110 miles from the mainland and closer  to Bergen in Norway than to Edinburgh. Shetland stretches around a hundred miles from north to south. with over 100 islands in the group, 15 of which are inhabited.

Early Shetland was occupied by Pictish peoples. They left no written history but ancient  towers called brochs, carved stones and beautiful silver objects. From about 800 AD, however, the Pictish peoples were either displaced by - or absorbed into - waves of immigration from Scandinavia as the Vikings expanded westwards.
 
Shetland remained under Norwegian control for around 600 years. Their rule ended as the result of a marriage treaty in 1468  when King Christian I of Norway mortgaged Shetland to the Scottish crown to raise part of the dowry for the marriage of his daughter Margaret to King James III of Scotland.  James went on to annex Shetland to the Scottish crown in 1472, though the Nordic influence remained strong on the islands.

 
A photograph from my third cousin Stuart, whose Smith ancestors came from Shetland.
 
 
ZELL AM SEE
 
Another place on our Austrian journeys lying between Innsbruck and Salzburg.  The local mountain the Schnittenhohe is over 6000 feet high. 
 
 
 



We have come to the end of my A-Z Journey into a Sense of Place. 
Thank you for joining me in my reminiscences. 
   Your comments have been much appreciated.

6 comments:

  1. YAY -- you made it! And you didn't think you would. I have enjoyed reading about all these various places in the world that I now want to visit. I need to have started years ago!!

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  2. Hi Sue, glad you made it to the end. You g=have taken us to some interesting places; sorry I haven;t been able to comment as often as I would have liked. Zetland is a name use in North Yorkshire too, Your pictures on Y for York are much better than mine - we live 30+ miles from York.

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  3. Well done on finishing the A-Z challenge. Thank you for some very interesting posts.

    When we were in Germany, my husband's cousin kept calling lakes "Sea". I thought he was getting his English mixed up and corrected him by telling he that we call it a Lake not Sea, explaining that the the Sea is the Ocean. I felt like a total idiot when I realised that See is the German word for lake!

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  4. Congratulations on finishing the challenge with lovely photos as well as interesting posts.

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  5. Thank you to everyone for your kind comments on my A-Z challenge postings. Keeping up the pace was a challenge in itself, but a very enjoyable one.

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  6. Congrats Sue on a super series.

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