Lund
GLOBAL GALAXY
The Shimmering Road
The Milky Way has inspired many stellar stories down here on Earth.
One story, in Norse mythology, tells that the Norse gods built a bridge between heaven and Earth, and called it Bifrost, the shimmering or quivering road.
It is also known as the road to the realm of the dead.
A World of Names
Unst isn’t alone in its wonder. All across the planet, ancient cultures looked at the same band of light and saw their own stories reflected. The Milky Way has many names and meanings across the globe.
Here are just a few:
Aramaic – ‘Fire Stream’ or ‘River of Light’
Finnish – ‘Way of the Birds’
Bengali – ‘Shadow Path’ or ‘Reflected Path’
Cherokee – ‘The Way the Dog Ran Away’
Japanese – ‘River of Heaven’
Swedish – ‘Winter Street’
Spanish and Catalan – ‘The Road to Santiago’
Vietnamese – ‘Silver River’
Thai – ‘The way of the white elephant’
Many moons ago
Our landscape is etched with the efforts of early people trying to track the movement of the planets.
On the road to Lund, the massive Neolithic standing stone stands as a silent observatory.
When aligned with its sister stone at Burragarth, it appears to track the complex movements of the Moon, proving that thousands of years ago, the residents of Unst were already master astronomers.
Visit Lund [W3W: trainer.twirls.tradition]
