Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

The beach at Hoswick is a small half-moon, facing south. To east and west, it is bounded by low cliffs, hardly more than rocky hills, where fulmars nest. They are not really very safe from humans, should the humans choose to disturb them, but that never seems to happen. Behind the beach, to the north, is a scrubby field, with a path leading up a gentle slope to the village. Through this field the Hoswick burn runs down, across the beach to the sea. It is a peaty burn; in wet and windy weather the peat runs gold and brown in it, and tiger-stripes the sea itself.

The beach is stony. Little sand can be seen unless the tide is well out, when small sandbars and islets appear in unpredictable places. They seem to shift often; one will show at low tide for a month, then vanish or move along the beach. While they exist, it can be mildly hypnotic to stand on one and feel yourself cut off from land, surrounded by sea.

The stones come in all sizes, from pebbles to rocks, and most are abraded by the sea to a fantastic, translucent smoothness, as if they had been tumble-polished. Of the many colours, perhaps the most frequent are white and black. That sounds dull, but the white are of a bleached purity, sometimes veined with pink or red like fine marble, while the black are generally smooth, flat and obsidian. It is not the blue-black of a crow, but a fathomless, matt black that makes you understand why black is defined as the absence of colour. The black holes in space, that swallow matter for ever, must be that colour.

The sounds and smells of the beach, and indeed of the village, depend mostly on what the wind is doing. When it blows hard from the south, it brings waves crashing in on the stones; it also brings piles of seaweed with the acrid, faintly medicinal smell that always feels as if it must be good for the health. In a south wind, no other smells or sounds can make headway against seaweed and ocean on stones. Walking on a winter night in the village, with nothing visible beyond the lights of the lanes, you can hear only the nearby sea, moving restlessly in the dark.

In calmer weather, and when the wind comes from another quarter, different smells make themselves felt; in winter, mainly peat smoke from the village chimneys. This is acrid in a different way from the seaweed, less healthy, catching the back of the throat, but comforting too, on a cold day, since it speaks of lit stoves indoors. If the winter wind is from the east, it will bring also the sweet, slightly sickly smell of silage bales from Stove, up the road to the east.

In summer the pervading smell is far more subtle; the intense, insidious scent of the village's many honeysuckle hedges ambushing the passer-by. There are wild rose hedges too, and though these are mostly scentless, every so often you find a white one with a scent even more subtle than the honeysuckle's, but these you must go close up to, or you miss it.

As for the sounds of the village, you can tell when autumn has come because the calls of sheep give place to those of greylag geese; indeed by winter there are more geese in the fields than sheep. But winter or summer, there are bird calls: gulls and waders and the chattering starlings who live all year round in the small plantations of trees in front of Cliff Cottage and the hotel. Trees are not common in Shetland, and Hoswick, sheltered by the steep hill to the west, has more than most Shetland villages. Hence it also has more birds, particularly birds of passage and, in the migration season, flocks of birders with woolly hats, binoculars and an intense expression, as though they had strained their eyes with overmuch peering.

I may be making the village sound too idyllic. It is not something off a chocolate box; there are many one-time fishermen's cottages decayed into sheds, and some of these in turn becoming uncared-for, even derelict. In winter, especially, most of the houses look as if they need a coat of paint or a re-render, for the weather is hard on them and nothing in the decorating line can be attempted until spring. The buildings of the small construction business that failed a couple of years ago stand empty in their yard, cluttered with unwanted materials, though these grow fewer all the time, because the villagers recycle most of them into maintaining their own sheds or houses. In late autumn the village feels unusually busy, as people race to finish outdoor tasks they’ve been putting off, and for which there is now little time in the rapidly diminishing hours of daylight.

Spring is probably the village’s best season, because there are a great many daffodils in the gardens and verges. They provide the year’s first real burst of colour, clear and rather cold – the celandines, which come a little later, are a warmer, more golden yellow. The prevailing colour is yellow for quite some time, until the lower-growing, unsuspected bluebells come into flower and suddenly there are lakes and drifts of blueness everywhere. It is in spring that the air smells least of other things, like seaweed or peat, and more of itself; there is a cleanness about it like that of mineral water and the same pleasing, metallic taste. It becomes a positive pleasure to breathe it in, not something you do automatically but something to stop and think about, to savour. Before I came here, I would never have thought breathing could be so enjoyable.