Nobody warns you that wildness is an addiction. The more we embrace the great outdoors, relishing the physical challenges it affords us, the more extreme our tastes in adventure become. After moving to Margate last year and falling in love with sea-swimming, I knew my 2017 summer holiday would be all about the sea, but I craved solitude, barren beauty and bracingly cold waves. So I planned every wilderness-seeker’s dream trip: a campervan tour of Shetland’s most remote beaches.

The Shetland Islands are Scotland’s northernmost isles; the nearest city is Bergen in Norway, not Inverness. During ‘Simmer Dim’, the long twilight hours of midsummer, the sun barely sets on this subarctic archipelago of 300 islands and skerries (small, rocky outcrops too small to live on). Just 16 islands are inhabited, the largest charmingly called Mainland. It’s here, in Lerwick, that our overnight ferry docks 12 long hours after leaving Aberdeen, and we drive north, taking two tiny 10-minute ferries to the island of Yell and on to Unst. The first beach on my hitlist is Unst’s – and therefore Shetland’s, and therefore Britain’s – northernmost beach: Skaw. Like many of Shetland’s beaches, it’s graced with pristine white sands, bookended by melodramatic cliffs and voluptuous hills; the sort of beach that would have been thoroughly ruined by tourism had it been some 300km south, and some seven degrees warmer.

Swim off Shetland's secret beaches