Gansey Nation

The office was infested with a swarm of blowflies last week, not in the strongrooms thank heaven, but all the public areas. It’s been like a zombie apocalypse, only with buzzing insects instead of the shuffling undead. We slaughtered them like orcs, keeping score much as Gimli and Legolas did at Helm’s Deep. (“My score is now nine enemy slain,” Sharon said, brandishing a can of Raid; “Not bad,” I replied, “but my tally is now twelve; it’s been paper towel work on the kitchen window.”)

I expect Gimli the dwarf enjoyed a bit of light knitting of an evening while he rested from the day’s battles, and so it’s been with me. I’m zonking down the sleeve, and may even finish it this weekend. (Maybe not, though – I plan to do a six-inch cuff.) I’m decreasing at a rate of two stitches every 7th row, and should end up with c.96 stitches for the cuff – if I’ve got my maths right.

Chanonry Point Lighthouse

If you’re ever in the Highlands I recommend a visit to the Black Isle, just north of Inverness. It’s not really an island, but somehow the “Black Peninsula” doesn’t quite have the same ring. It’s fertile and green and wooded, not really words that you can apply to Caithness with a straight face, and with its yachts and marinas and general air of prosperity looks like a little bit of Cape Cod in Scotland.

A view up the Great Glen

The Black Isle also has Chanonry Point near Fortrose, a long spit of land jutting out into the firth. We were there last weekend – it’s supposed to be a great place to see dolphins, and although there were none frolicking while we were there, we did spot a rare ice cream van, which in many ways on a hot day was even better.

And now it’s time to take up Anduril, my trusty paper towel, and return to the fray against the sworn enemy of my people, the blowfly. And because we men of the North believe in honouring our fallen enemies, we shall gather the bodies and burn them in a funeral mound at sunset, like the riders of Rohan, while singing sad laments (Where now the fly that was buzzing/ To where can the insect fly?/ Where now the stropping of feelers/ While it feasted on my blueberry pie..?”)

Spring has come to Caithness, and possibly summer too, with blue skies, light winds, and temperatures in the mid to high teens. (Or at least I presume they are—I have a special Caithness-adjusted thermometer which only goes up to 13ºC, on the grounds that any further numbers are redundant.)

The air is full of birds, too. The trees are as noisy as school playgrounds, and our car’s been used as an avian lavatory so often it looks like a painting by Jackson Pollock. Swallows are zipping about all over the place, with that weird dipping flight that makes them look as though they’re being jerked along on strings for a joke.

On Saturday we went for a stroll along Dunnet beach, which lies on the north coast somewhere between Thurso and John O’Groats. There we encountered a new breed of dog, a cross between a dachshund and a friendly piranha. If you held out your hand for a neighbourly sniff, the next thing you knew your arm had disappeared up to the elbow in slavering jaws and drool, and you looked like a novice vet trying to conduct a rectal examination orally.

Not a bouncy castle, or why we were at a standstill for 20 minutes. The road was closed to move this huge piece of equipment.

Significant progress on the gansey this week: the front is finished, the shoulders are joined and I’ve started the collar. The jumper is 209 stitches across; so each shoulder is 70 stitches and the neck is 69 (70+70+69 = 209).

I decided to make the neck quite deep this time, some 28 rows, and so—since I decrease on the neck at a rate of 1 stitch every 2 rows—that meant 14 decreases per side. I therefore started each shoulder with 84 stitches on the needle and decreased down to 70 to give a nice, rounded (yet daringly plunging) neckline; and the stitches that were left for the neck at the front were correspondingly reduced to 41 (i.e., 69-14-14 = 41). The shoulders were cast off using the conventional three-needle bind-off.

It usually takes me 6-8 weeks to do the sleeves, so I might actually finish this one by the end of July—in other words, just in time for the Caithness winter…

This week I’d like to share with you two bits of Caithness gansey lore, courtesy of George Bethune of Dunbeath and Harry Gray of Wick, each of whom had fathers who fished the herring and wore ganseys—and what these two gentlemen don’t know about the history of Caithness and the fishing industry could probably fill the space on a postage stamp, but only if you wrote in big, capital letters.

George contributed to the Moray Firth Gansey Project, and his story is recounted in their book, along with a picture of his father in his gansey, on page 37. But it’s so interesting I think it’s worth repeating here. We were talking about ganseys, and the way the Scottish ones had buttons on the neck to keep them tight; and he said that the buttons would always be on the other shoulder to your main hand—in other words, if you were right-handed, the buttons would be on the left side, and vice-versa.

Harry Gray and Gordon

The reason was that when loading the boats the men would heave the nets up onto their shoulder, like men pulling a cart. And if the buttons were on the same shoulder as the nets, they’d run the risk of snagging on them—as indeed George says happened once to one poor fisherman in Dunbeath: when the nets were being loaded, they caught in his buttons and he was pulled violently down and broke his neck against the harbour quay.

Harry is the Chairman of the Wick Society, which runs the Aladdin’s cave-cum-museum in town, and he came in to collect the Caithness-patterned gansey I knitted recently, and which I was donating to the museum.

He said that in the old days the fishermen used to wear their ganseys next to the skin—except for old newspapers, which they’d wrap round their chests as a sort of under-layer to keep the wind out. “It made you crackle when you moved,” Harry said, “but it didn’t half keep you warm.”

Meanwhile, my own project moves on apace, though slower now I’m back at work. I’m seven-eighths of the way up the back, and it’s almost time to get the slide rule out to start calculating how much space to allow for the shoulder strap (which will be 22 stitches wide). Sometime in the next week I’ll hopefully start the front.

In parish notices, many congratulations to Sue Rees for a splendid Staithes gansey, which can be seen here being stylishly modelled by husband Paul. As I’ve always said, this is in many ways still one of the most effective patterns.

So remember: next time you’re thinking of throwing away that old newspaper, spare a thought for those fishermen who used them for keeping more than just their fish and chips warm; and the stories that lie behind even simple things like buttons on the neck…