Steve,

 

You are right in saying that its not dumb to put Shetland in its true geographic position, rather than in a box, but the downside is that if you do, the whole of mainland Scotland needs to then shrink by 40% to get everything on the same page.

 

The campaign to “get Shetland out of its box” has been actively discussed in Scotland in the last few months. The Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s blog piece by Bruce Gittings at https://rsgs.org/is-shetland-a-cartographic-compromise-too-far/ summarises some of the main cartographic arguments. These issues too, on the cartographic dilemma of where to put Shetland, have also been recently discussed in ‘Scotland: Mapping the Islands’ (2016) https://www.birlinn.co.uk/Scotland-Mapping-the-Islands.html.

 

Of course yes, there are broader economic, political and cultural arguments that this reflects. Shetland was settled by the Norse from the 9^th century, only joining the Kingdom of Scotland in 1469, and has maintained close links with Scandinavia. In the Scottish independence referendum of 2014, Shetland voted very strongly against Scottish independence from Great Britain (although not as strongly as Orkney) – the referendum vote is mapped out (with Shetland in a box) at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-29255449.

 

This new legislation effectively only relates to maps produced on paper by public-sector institutions, so arguably will not have a major impact on most maps that people are looking at to see Shetland today.

 

…and just a nice map to finish with comes from this T-shirt, produced in Shetland in the 1980s: https://geo.nls.uk/mapdata2/islands/T_shirt_detail.jpg

 

Chris Fleet

National Library of Scotland