Shetland Pilgrimage

Holy islands in Northern Scotland

SOLI Sisters

The SOLI Sisters - or to give them their full title, the "Society of Our Lady of the Isles" - were a community of Anglican sisters who made their home in the North Isles of Shetland. Sr Agnes had arrived in Fetlar in 1984 from Posbury convent in Devon and intended to live as a Franciscan solitary in an old croft at Aith Ness which she rented from a local family. The first chapel was a small room in the roof space, but when that was later needed for an expanding community, the byre end of the croft was converted to the "Byre Chapel". A drawing of it survives in this bookplate:

Sister Agnes told the story of the community in a series of four books. The first was "A Tide that Sings" (London 1988), which took the story of her vocation as an Anglican religious sister to the time of her arrival in Fetlar.

This book was a publishing success for SPCK and she was asked to write a sequel, telling the story of how the Fetlar community developed. This was published as "The Song of the Lark" in 1992. The next two books, "Island Song" (2001) and "For Love Alone" (2003) came after her ordination as a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church when SOLI was recognised as a religious congregation. From that point onwards she was known as Mother Mary Agnes and those last two books were published under that name, always with the addition of "SOLI". They were universally known as the SOLI sisters.

Most of my pictures for this blog come from pictures left in books I inherited from Sister Mary Aidan. This is an undated winter view of Fetlar from the Ness. Shetland winters can be harsh and one of the early books described a gale so strong it wrecked the caravan they used for guests.

This postcard shows a more benign view of Fetlar in early summer. It is known as the Garden Isle, mainly because of the fields of wild flowers. It was once a flourishing agricultural area but the community which numbered only about one hundred in the 1990s has now shrunk further to about sixty. The sisters received some substantial building grants from the Shetland Islands Council in the hope that a religious community would help to arrest the population decline.

Mother Mary Agnes began with a basically Franciscan outlook, blended with a love for Celtic spirituality. Other influences came from the Catholic religious orders, especially Cistercian and Carthusian, but one conception which was distinctively her own was the visualisation of her growing congregation as a wheel. At the hub, a community of sisters living a semi-eremitic life of prayer on Fetlar, then spokes out to a rim which she called the Caim, a group of lay members living in their own homes who supported the community by their prayers and financial contributions. Between these two were Associate members who lived in Shetland and held civilian jobs. They would return to Fetlar at the weekends and the new convent builtings at Aith Ness had a number of wooden buildings (see the first photo) to accommodate them. The community also rented properties elsewhere, notably "Da Gaets" at Culswick and "St Mahri's Hame" at Bridge of Walls, both on the West side of Shetland. A map became a regular feature of the books.

By the time I got to know the community, they had relocated to the neighbouring island of Unst. Mother Mary Agnes built a new convent at Westing, with dramatic views over the sea and towards the old Norse chapel at Lund. Sister Mary Aidan, the only other SOLI sister in vows, was by then living in sheltered accommodation in Uyeasound. I took the following two pictures in summer 2023, a few months before Mother Mary Agnes left Shetland to return to the English Midlands. She had guided the SOLI community for nearly forty years.

And here is Mother Mary Agnes in her stall in the chapel on Unst:

The SOLI community in Shetland came to an end on 17th January 2026 with the death of Sister Mary Aidan in Unst. She had a very ecumenical funeral. An Orthodox nun assisted in the preparation of her body for burial. At her request, there was a Requiem Mass in the Catholic Church in Lerwick, and her body lay overnight before the altar before being driven to Unst for a burial service led by the Anglican bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney in the Methodist Chapel in Haroldswick, with the retired Methodist Minister on the organ. We were saying goodbye not just to Sister Mary Aidan but the community she represented.

Ambrose Flavell, 15th August 2026.

15 Aug 2026