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The weather’s been horrible this last week. Rain becomes sleet becomes hail becomes snow, then more rain, all of it swooping down from the Arctic and slamming into Caithness with the force of an All Black pack piling into an English scrum. The land is sodden, it can’t take any more. Fields are waterlogged, turned into temporary lochs. Horses and cattle and sheep stare disconsolately at you as you pass, muddy and bedraggled and ankle deep in dirty water, as if thinking it’s just as well they can’t hold a pen or there’d be a stiffly worded letter about this in the John O’Groat Journal next Friday. And still it rains. Horizontally.
I’ve been thinking about land this week because we received a new oldest document, a feu charter dating from 1469—a grant of land, in other words. It’s written in Latin on parchment—one day horned Highland cattle will rise up and take over the world and I’m not looking forward to telling them what most of my archives are written on—and records a grant of land at Reiss and Ackergill to one James Brisbane of Wick (or “Weke” as it charmingly spells it, as if the scribe was from Yorkshire).
 Rain When this document was written, Edward IV of England had been ruling peacefully for almost eight years, unaware that in a few short months Warwick the Kingmaker would start a rebellion that would reignite the Wars of the Roses; while in Scotland James III was in the process of negotiating the transfer of Shetland and Orkney from Norway, which had ruled them since the days of Viking longships. The oldest documents are almost all about land, because parchment was expensive and you only recorded what you needed to know for the future.
 Rain Of course the irony is that 548 years later James Brisbane and his fellow landowners are not even a distant memory, just names on a scrap of parchment. The land’s still there, though, soggier and owned by other people. And you might say that an archive is a record of what people used to think was important. There’s a great quote from Native American Chief Seattle on land ownership: “We do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us?” Sometimes I think archives should contain the sparkle of the water too.
Rain. In gansey news, I have joined the shoulders (no ridge and furrow, just the pattern all the way up to the three needle bind-off), and am well embarked on my first sleeve. I outsourced the picking up stitches round the armhole to Margaret this time, as the dark nights, navy yarn and the wee hole in the centre of my right eye’s vision make that sort of fine work problematical for me just now. Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted that the pattern bands on the sleeve are all four stitches narrower than on the body.
Finally, here is one of my favourite jokes on the way perceptions change over time. Apologies if you’ve heard it before, it’s from an old Punch cartoon. It’s set in Hell, and a tide of humanity is flowing along a rocky defile surrounded by flames, demons with pitchforks on every crag. At the front are two sad, fat naked little men. One turns to the other and says mournfully, “Apparently, what I’m in here for is no longer a sin.”
The ghost of James Brisbane of Weke haunts the waterlogged fields of Reiss and Ackergill, collar turned up against the wind, blowing on his frozen hands, telling anyone who’ll listen that once upon a time he used to own all this…
 What was the most unusual thing you did last week? In my case it involved a tour of an abandoned underground nuclear bunker which is, rather delightfully, up for sale.
I was down in Inverness for a meeting related to industrial archaeology, and the tour was arranged as part of that. The bunker lies unexpectedly in a housing estate, just a few blocks from Raigmore Hospital. It was built by the RAF during World War Two, and buried beneath a mound of sand and gravel to cushion the impact of any German bombs; afterwards repurposed as a command centre during the Cold War, the bunker ended its days as an emergency planning centre for civil disasters such as flooding.
It’s a weird, eerie, desolate place seen by flashlight, two storeys deep, all long corridors and low ceilings filled with dead air and a sense of abandonment. Here’s the operations centre, a large room with a massive table in the centre for pushing little markers across maps; there’s the fully fitted industrial kitchen and food store; and there’s the room with the safe, in which a man sat a man with a loaded weapon at all times—just in case, you understand; just in case. Walking through the musty, empty rooms it feels as though the disaster actually happened, and what’s left is a Pompeii without people.
The best room of all is the most unexpected: the one with the ancient generator. But it’s not the generator that makes you stop and stare. No, it’s the two pristine racing bicycles, each of them lacking a front wheel. And then you get it: if the fuel ran out, you could sit on the bikes and generate electricity by pedal power. (This of course adds a whole new meaning to, ahem, survival of the fittest…)
In gansey news, I have finished the back and and have almost finished the front. In keeping with the photos in Gladys Thompson I am continuing the pattern by way of shoulder straps (this is instead of my more usual rig ‘n fur shoulder strap). I’ll still join them with a three needle bind-off, so I will have a wee ridge running along the length of the shoulders at the join. But do I care? Never a bit: if it’s good enough for Gladys, it’s good enough for me!
 Power Cycling After the tour of the bunker we were all glad to get out, back to the cold, fresh November air. And I suddenly realised what had been in the back of my mind the whole time: with its duck-egg blue corridors of peeling paint, and its oppressive atmosphere or fear and catastrophe, it reminded me disturbingly of Northampton Grammar School for Boys, c.1971. And I suppose it would be some consolation to the last few surviving members of mankind, trapped deep underground as the radioactive winds howled across the surface of a dead planet, to know that they were excused double cross-country running on Thursdays, at least…
[By the way, the BBC did a couple of features on the bunker. You can see the main article here; and there are more photographs here.]
 On Saturday we went back to Sarclet harbour, one of our favourite places. It’s about ten miles south of us off the beaten track (turn off the A99 at Thrumster and push on for a mile or so till you run out of road, and there it lies). I’ve spoken before of its appeal as ruined harbour, destroyed in the same great storm of 1872 that smashed the Stevenson breakwater at Wick. It’s an amazing place to explore, though sometimes the ghosts crowd round so thick it’s like walking through early morning mist.
But Sarclet as a place where seals come on their holidays, hoping to pick up a bit of a tan, was entirely new to me. We were standing on the cliffs overlooking the bay and got quite excited when we saw a snout bobbing in the swell. Then we looked at the beach and realised that those tubular grey things that we’d taken for rocks, or possibly an invasion of giant slugs, were in fact an entire colony of seals–more than thirty of the little blighters. From that height they looked like they’d all been squeezed from a tube; I wondered if we’d turned up half an hour earlier we might have caught God down on the beach squeezing them out; as if He secretly replenishes the world’s stocks when nobody is looking, and these ones were still sticky and wet and new.
Alas, a family group of homo sapiens was there before us. But while mother and daughter prudently hung back, father decided to go for a closer look. Well, I could have told him what would happen: half the seals at once bolted for the safety of the ocean, scootching over the rocks with that lumbering breaststroke they use on land; the rest waited, poised for flight. At this the silly ass decided to get an even closer look, and within thirty seconds all but one of the pod was underwater. We could see them swimming in the shallows, popping up now and then to see if the coast was clear, and barking rude pinniped imprecations when they found it wasn’t. At this point we took our leave, feeling obscurely embarrassed on behalf of our species. At least now I understand why seals always look so mournful in the presence of us humans.
In gansey news I have almost completed the back. You can see the pattern more clearly now, simple but effective, and the central panels always remind me of Native American breastplate armour. I am still just about managing to keep to a rate of one 100g ball of yarn per week, though sooner or later I’ll get a life and slow down considerably.
TECHNICAL STUFF
 Ladder (22 sts) and cables The simplicity of the pattern is a big part of its appeal for me, so I determined to keep it simple. I wanted to keep the proportions, too: six panels divided by cables, with a double cable in the centre. In Thompson and Pearson the ladder panels are 18 stitches wide and the double moss stitch panels 16 stitches wide. I had my usual 368 stitches on the body, or 183 stitches for front and back (368-2 seam sts = 366; 366/2 = 183 stitches) to start with. Six cables = an additional 6 stitches.
With a little finagling I found that if I increased by 5 stitches for the cables (instead of 6) I could make the ladders 22 stitches wide and the double moss panels 20 stitches (i.e., an increase of 4 stitches per panel), as follows:
4 cables @ 10 stitches per cable = 40 sts.
 And there were fireworks in the evening. 1 central cable @ 18 sts = 18 sts.
4 ladder panels @ 22 sts per panel = 88 sts.
2 moss panels @ 20 sts per panel = 40 sts.
2 flanking sts @ 1 st. each = 2 sts.
 Double moss panel (20 sts) and cables All of this adds up to 188 stitches (183 + 5). The flanking stitches are one at either side, and are there to serve as pick-up stitches around the armhole–so I can pick up the stitches for the sleeve without affecting etc pattern.
 We went back to St John’s Point this weekend. This time, instead of making a detour to Scotland’s Haven, we pushed on to the Point itself, a little spike jutting into the Pentland Firth like a decorative leaf-blade on the northern coast of Caithness. You park the car by the roadside and then squelch your way for half a mile or so down a sheep track through gorse and moss and mud, discovering along the way that your boots are not, in fact, as waterproof as you’d hoped.
O Merry Men! The remains of a hill fort dominate the headland; ditch, stone and mound. The guidebooks say that it was put there to defend the coast, but given the biting north wind it was probably erected by local sheep, working in relays, as a windbreak. Just off St John’s Point the tidal race known as The Merry Men of Mey is formed; the Atlantic smashes itself in waves onto jagged rocks below you and the islands of Stroma and Orkney loom over the churning waters.
Hoy from St John’s Point Originally Orkney seems to have taken its name from the Pictish tribe who lived there, and meant the island of salmon (or possibly young pigs). But the Pictish word “orc” is practically the same as the Norse word “orkn”, meaning a seal—so when the Vikings turned up they just took the word, added the suffix “eyjar” (islands) and called it Orkneyjar, or Seal Islands. Eventually the “jar” at the end fell into disuse and we were left with plain Orkney.
Seal in Wick River I had wondered if this had anything to do with Tolkien’s orcs, having recently been reading The Lord of the Rings, but they seem to have an entirely different derivation—from the Old English “orc”, meaning something like an ogre. The word also appears in Beowulf as “orcneas” (demon corpses), and Tom Shippey suggests that as it didn’t have a settled meaning Tolkien felt free to appropriate it for his goblin soldiers. It’s a shame it has nothing to do with Orkney, mind you, as I’ve had abandon my ideas of writing a story where a band of orcs, after the fall of the Dark Lord, decide to settle on Orkney and take up knitting.
In gansey news I have started the gussets, and the yoke. I said last week that this is one of my favourite patterns. I think part of the reason is that this is the first gansey proper in Gladys Thompson‘s inspirational book: 30-odd years ago I opened the book, saw the photograph, and it became imprinted on my brain like a mother duck on a baby duckling. (Looking back, I’m probably fortunate it wasn’t a book on extreme ironing, say, or zorbing.) I know the pattern so well that I haven’t even bothered with a pattern chart. But I’ll post one next week and say more on how I’ve gone about it.
Finally, in parish news Judit has sent me pictures of another gansey she’s knitted. This one’s taken from Beth Brown-Reinsel‘s book (p.136). It’s a striking combination of pattern bands—chequers, diagonal and vertical lines and many more—and the lavender colour really shows it off to good effect. (Judit’s also sent a photo of a previous incarnation of the same patterns, this time in white, so you can see it being modelled.) Once again, warmest congratulations to Judit!
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