Gansey Nation

Here’s a thought—Margaret tells me Ganseys.com has just passed 200 posts (this is number 201). Which—taking into account breaks for holidays, nervous prostration, etc.—means we’ve been going for nearly six years. Six years! No wonder I’m feeling old. Back then I was a mere stripling, still had my own hair and didn’t have to walk round with the neighbour’s cat velcroed to my scalp (honestly: do you think anyone can tell?).

It’s been a beautiful weekend in Caithness, crisp autumn sunshine and blue skies, but with that bite in the wind that tells you the equinox is past and the winter dark is coming with all the grim inevitability of a dental appointment. So we went to the Whaligoe Steps.

The steps start at bottom left and zigzag up to the top. Part of the salt-house can been on the right.

Whaligoe is a natural harbour just a few miles south of Wick, a narrow cleft cut out of the coast like the first slice from a cake. It’s not very accessible; basically, you look down on the bay from the cliffs, a drop as sheer as a four-storey office block. But harbours are pretty rare along here, and you have to make the most of what you’ve got, so a couple of hundred years ago over 300 stone steps were laid in a zig-zag all the way down to the bottom of the cliff, where an artificial grassy area (“the size of a tennis court”, as the guide books say) was laid, called the Bink.

Cormorant on Muckle Loups and, slightly below and to the left, a mooring ring.

Boats—up to twenty-four at the height of the Victorian fishing boom—would come into the harbour and tie up at the Neist, a rocky shelf, and would unload creels of herring, which would be carted or winched up to the Bink, gutted by the fisher lassies and packed (you can still see the ruins of a shed where the salt was stored) and then put to one side until a schooner could call and pick them up. Barrels and salt had to be carted down the 300+ steps from the top of the cliff. (My legs were protesting long before I reached the bottom, and it was a fine day; but doing it on a cold day, in the driving wind, with the rain making the steps slick and slippery, casks of salt on my back?—I think not!)

On the way down the steps. Gordon is mid-picture, disappearing around the curve of the steps.

Hard to imagine now, but at one time it would have been full of activity and bustle. Now it’s just another monument of weathered stone, deserted as a ruined medieval monastery, with that same sense of sadness and stillness; the only life, the bright mustard-coloured lichen on the sea-facing rocks and the odd German Stuka pilot reincarnated as a seagull.

So Whaligoe is worth a visit next time you’re passing. And—how civilised is this?—there’s now a cafe-restaurant on top of the cliffs overlooking the ocean. So you can slog all the way down and back up, and treat yourself to a very nice coffee and piece of cake without feeling guilty, because you’ve (probably) earned it.

Gordon on the Bink, showing the bottom of the steps. The Neist is in the background.

In gansey news, I have finished the garter stitch welt and the inch of plain knitting that tops it, and have started the pattern for the body (albeit only just). Because I’ve run on so much about the dear old Steps, I’m afraid I don’t have space here to give you the pattern charts—they’ll have to wait for next week (ain’t I a tease?). But as you can see each side of the gansey will be divided into seven panels, each twenty-five stitches wide. Each panel is separated from its neighbour by a two-stitch cable (cabled every sixth row), flanked on each side by two purl stitches. The panels will alternate an open moss-stitch diamond and a zig-zag (although I still have an open mind about the zig-zag). Much more on this next week.

So there we are. As some of you will remember, I gave up chocolate (and cheese and crisps) a couple of years ago, when the doctors checked my cholesterol and then advised me to stick to reading only short books in future—or maybe just haiku poetry—just in case… But if 200 posts isn’t a milestone worth celebrating, then I don’t know what is.

Now, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, we’re getting an incredible 150,000-plus hits a month—and the number is growing all the time (we are the Gansey Nation, guys). I know that some of you have been here from the very beginning, while others come in all the time, and others drop in and out, depending on mood and circumstances. So: thanks to all of you who’ve made Ganseys.com such a success—and who make it worth our while to keep it going. Here’s to the next 200! (Or, well—given that my cholesterol has just taken one more for the team—let’s say 25 for now, and we’ll see how it goes, shall we…?)

View from the Bink seaward, with Muckle Loups in the centre

Back at work today after a week’s holiday, so I’m in a fairly sombre mood. The weather’s put on mourning grey in sympathy, summer’s over, now there’s nothing for it but to see the nights grow shorter to Christmas, like a marooned sailor slowly watching the tide come in and submerge his tiny atoll. Did I mention the sombreness? (Or is that sombriety? In Spanish, of course, sombrero.)

We had a good break, though, hosting a visit by our friends Vincent and Derek in a mini-Indian summer. Highlights included a visit to the exposed headland of Dunnet Head in gale-force winds, which was bracing, albeit uncomfortably like standing in a wind tunnel (I learned I am not as aerodynamic as I thought), and a visit to the Castle of Mey.

Off Dunnet Head: last week

This was the late Queen Mother’s private retreat, a charming little castle overlooking the ocean, now run by a trust and open to the public. It’s well worth a visit, even for republicans like me, as you can both admire the architecture and pick up gossip about the royal family at the same time. (Sometimes the devil takes over my mouth, though, as when I suggested, when the assistant pointed out the mysterious red legs of a heraldic creature on a tapestry, that it probably reflected the fact that they’d ‘waded through blood to the throne.’ Ahem.) My favourite story? The guest who thought her bedroom was haunted after seeing strange lights in the night, only to have the lighthouse up the coast pointed out next day.

Off Dunnet Head: a ‘normal’ day

Anyway, I’m slowly working through my pipeline of gansey projects, and here’s the next. It’s going to be a north of Scotland gansey, possibly another Hebridean pattern (I haven’t decided yet), in Frangipani cream. It has to be light – with my eyesight, any dark colour and I might as well knit blindfold. It’s going to be a cardigan, so it has a steek of 20 stitches running up the front centre. And after the repetitive multi-cabled Filey gansey, when I found myself so in the groove I even found myself cabling my spaghetti at dinnertime, this one won’t have any cables until the yoke.

It’s for a 45-inch chest in the round, so I cast on 420 stitches for the gansey, plus the 20 for the steek, a total of 440. Unusually for me, the welt is in garter stitch, alternating knit and purl rows. This isn’t as easy as ribbing, I find (ribbing sits more comfortably on my needles), but it doesn’t draw in so much on the hips for the wearer, and anyway I rather like the look, which reminds me of the curved wall of an Iron age broch. To keep the welt nice and loose it’s the same size as the body, so no increases this time (I usually increase 10% from ribbed welt to body).

The downside to garter stitch, I have discovered – and I share this nugget with you for free – is that it concertinas, like pleats on a skirt. So you think, aha, that’s 24 rows completed, that must equate to a whopping two inches; only to find that when placed next to a ruler it wilts like last week’s lettuce and you barely scrape an inch and a half. How unfair is that? Garter stitch is the Catch-22 or Zeno’s paradox of knitting.

I’ve been trying to think of something cheerful to end on, and the best I can come up with is this: there’s just 106 sleeps till Christmas. Time to start sketching out that list…