4. St Petersburg

Writer Malachy Tallack has set out from Shetland on a journey around the sixtieth parallel.

Today, he arrives in St Petersburg, the most highly populated place on the parallel.

Marking a borderland between 'near' and 'far north', the 60th parallel wraps itself around the lower reaches of Finland, Sweden and Norway.

It crosses the tip of Greenland and of South Central Alaska and cuts the great spaces of Russia and Canada in half.

The parallel also passes through Shetland, at the very top of the British Isles.

Malachy travelled to some of the places that share this latitude, beginning in Shetland, where he has spent most of his life.

Wrestling with notions of home and belonging, he hoped that the journey would help him come to terms with his father's untimely death.

Focusing on the landscapes and natural environments of the parallel, and the way that people have interacted with those landscapes, Tallack explores themes of wildness and community, of isolation and engagement, of exile and memory.

Abridged by Laurence Wareing.

Read by Sandy Grierson.

Producer: Kirsteen Cameron

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in July 2015.