Huffin' and Puffin.

Pony, Pony.

Shetland, Scotland – Stepping to the fence, we’re greeted by a small snort.

More of a sniffle, really.

While much shorter, Shetland ponies are a little like Fabio: extremely strong, with long, flowing manes. No, they're not what Shetland sweaters are made of.

Single-lane roads carry us through stretches of peat, rock and the brightest greens I've ever seen. The landscape is a Tic-Tac-Toe board of crumbling foundations and lines of stone pressed into endless fences.

They could have been built at any point in history.

Neolithic. Bronze Age. Iron Age. Picts. Vikings. Romans. Or pretty much any other age you casually flip past in a history book – it's all here. At Jalshof, you can walk through 4,000 years of human settlement. An archaeologist's dream.

The island is history, wrapped in endless, rolling pastures.

Much of it has been scattered to the sheep.

Much ado about Puffin.

The hills are salt-and-peppered with thousands of them. Wool is strewn across the grass like dandelion fluff, providing pillows for countless dozing lambs, legs akimbo.

Heading south, the morning's shifting, moody greys give way to blue. A dozen Grey and Harbour seals take full advantage, sunning on the beach, seemingly pumped full of air.

We narrowly miss the gate closing for an incoming plane as we cross the Sumburgh Airport runway, which stretches across the road.

Arriving at the 200-year-old Sumburgh Head Lighthouse, we're greeted by a distinctive stench. It makes being out of breath from the hike up that much more unpleasant. 

Built atop 300-foot cliffs, the lighthouse is home to a nature reserve, where thousands of seabirds nest in the craggy rock. Guillemots whistle. Kittiwakes and Fulmars flip about, trying to get our attention.

But everyone's focused on the Puffins.