Lunna House is a 17th-century

laird Laird () is the owner of a large, long-established Scottish estate. In the traditional Scottish order of precedence, a laird ranked below a baron and above a gentleman. This rank was held only by those lairds holding official recognition in ...

's house on

Lunna Ness Lunna (born June 30, 1960; born María Socorro García de la NocedaGarcia de la Noceda is her paternal surname) is a Puerto Rican singer of popular music and jazz who was the director of the television show ''Objetivo Fama'', the Latin version ...

in the Shetland Islands. Lunna House is noted for having "the best historic

designed landscape {{Unreferenced, date=April 2022 A designed landscape is an area of land which has been modified by people for primarily aesthetic effect. The term is used by historians to denote various types of site, such as gardens, parks, cemetery, cemeteries, a ...

in Shetland". In the 20th century it was used as a base of the wartime

Shetland Bus The Shetland Bus (Norwegian Bokmål: ''Shetlandsbussene'', def. pl.) was the nickname of a clandestine special operations group that made a permanent link between Mainland Shetland in Scotland and German-occupied Norway from 1941 until the su ...

operation. The house is protected as a category B listed building, and the grounds are included in the

Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland The ''Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland'' is a listing of gardens and designed landscapes of national artistic and/or historical significance, in Scotland. The Inventory was originally compiled in 1987, although it is a cont ...

, the national listing of significant gardens.

History

Lunna House dates from before 1663 and was built on the site of a medieval haa (hall), which itself was built on the site of a Viking longhouse. The east side of the house (on the right in the picture) was built in the 1660s for Robert Hunter (d.1695). Robert was Chamberlain of the Lordship of Zetland, and a

Commissioner of Supply Commissioners of Supply were local administrative bodies in Scotland from 1667 to 1930. Originally established in each sheriffdom to collect tax, they later took on much of the responsibility for the local government of the counties of Scotland. ...

. The house was extended in 1710, 1750, 1810, 1850 and finally between 1897 and 1910, when the south, north and west-sections of this cross-shaped house were built. The house is mainly constructed from stone and lime mortar, except for the newest section (1897-1910) which was made out of early cast concrete. The house was "harled" (covered in early concrete and pebble cladding ) around 1910 to hide the join between the concrete and thick stone sections of the house. The stones for the original construction of the house are believed to have come from the ruins of an Iron Age broch; the remains of which lie behind the original stone gateway of the house, south of the building. An armorial panel on the house commemorates the 1707 marriage of his son Thomas Hunter and Grisella Bruce, around which time this part of the house was added. In 1753, nearby Lunna Kirk was built by Robert Hunter (1710–1777), 3rd laird. Lunna Kirk is the oldest working Kirk (church) in Shetland. The formal landscape around the house was laid out during the 18th century, and augmented in the 19th century with Gothic ornaments, such as the beach cobble finials of the gates to the south-west of the house. On the hilltop beyond the gates is a small

folly In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but suggesting through its appearance some other purpose, or of such extravagant appearance that it transcends the range of usual garden buildings. Eighteenth-cent ...

, known as Hunter's Monument, which terminates the axis, and was formerly used as a lookout by the lairds. The harbour was also constructed in the 19th century, along with a walled garden and a

lime kiln A lime kiln is a kiln used for the calcination of limestone ( calcium carbonate) to produce the form of lime called quicklime (calcium oxide). The chemical equation for this reaction is : CaCO3 + heat → CaO + CO2 This reaction can take p ...

. In 1845 Robina Hunter inherited the property. The following year she married Robert Bell, Sheriff at Lerwick, and a son of the surgeon

Joseph Bell Joseph Bell FRCSE (2 December 1837 – 4 October 1911) was a Scottish surgeon and lecturer at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh in the 19th century. He is best known as an inspiration for the literary character Sherlock Hol ...

. Their son Robert Bell Hunter, 8th Laird of Lunna, sold the property in 1893 to John Bruce of

Sumburgh Sumburgh is a small settlement in the Shetland Islands, Scotland. Sumburgh is located at the south end of the Mainland on Sumburgh Head. Sumburgh Airport is just outside the village to the north. Sumburgh has a population of approximately 100. Ja ...

. Bruce had the house extended in the 20th century. During the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

, Lunna House was requisitioned by the UK War Office and became one of the bases of the

Special Operations Executive The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a secret British World War II organisation. It was officially formed on 22 July 1940 under Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton, from the amalgamation of three existing secret organisations. Its pu ...

(SOE). Following the invasion of Norway in May 1940, the house became the original base for the

, a clandestine operation to transfer men and materials between Shetland and Nazi-occupied

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the ...

. The sheltered harbour at Lunna, away from populated areas, was considered ideal. Lieutenant

David Howarth David Ross Howarth (born 10 November 1958) is a British academic and politician who was the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Cambridge from 2005–10. He served as an Electoral Commissioner between 2010 and 2018. He is Professor of L ...

set up the SOE base at Lunna House, which accommodated the Shetland Bus boat crews. The Shetland Bus operation moved to Scalloway in 1942, but the SOE base remained until the end of the war. The beaches below the house were used for testing one-man submarines and other equipment, as part of the SOE activities. By the end of the war, the house was in a poor condition. It was bought in the 1960s by the Lindsay family who rescued it from dereliction. Mains electricity reached the house in 1975. The Lindsays ran Lunna House as a B&B from the mid-1960s until 1997, when Mrs Ruby Lindsay retired, aged 89. The house was listed in 1971, and in 1998 the Folly, West Gates, Gothick Cottage, and Walled Garden were also listed at category B, as integral parts of the designed landscape, and with a group value of category A. Since 2001, the property has been owned by a family with wartime links to the SOE, and it has undergone further extensive renovations; repairing and replacing much of the sections of the slate roof, and internally repairing and restoring the fabric of the building.

References

External links

*{{Commons category-inline
Lunna House websiteLunna House
shetlopedia.com Listed houses in Scotland Category B listed buildings in Shetland Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes Lime kilns in the United Kingdom Mainland, Shetland