Gansey Nation

There’s an old joke about the Government sending out letters to people about something important, like tax; and on the envelope there’s a message saying, If you can’t read this, get someone else to read it for you.

Well, this is going to sound a bit like that message. You see, we’ve been having website problems, with pages either not opening at all, or taking so long to open you get timed out. We’re looking into it, and are trying a couple of fixes, but we’d really like to know if they’re working, or if you’re having trouble accessing the site. (Of course, like that joke, if you can’t access the site you’re not even going to be able to read this, but one thing at a time.)

You can either let me know in a comment, or email me directly at Gordon@ganseys.com.

Meanwhile, I knit away, and at the same time try to answer an ancient philosophical conundrum: if an archivist blogs on the internet and no one can read it, does he still exist? (We’ve also added the Seaspray Filey gansey to the gallery; if you can access anything, you can access it here.)

Fancy, a shag

This week I’ve completed another tree, and am about halfway up the body. I’m really enjoying this pattern, partly because it looks damn fine, but mostly because it’s very easy to knit. Once you start a row and get the number of plain stitches between the half-diamonds and the trees in each pattern repeat sorted out, you just keep going. It’s the least stressful gansey to knit I can remember: there aren’t even any cable rows to count.

Now the equinox has been and gone, we in the northern hemisphere are entering a chilly, damp autumn. But while summer lingered like a favourite aunt we paid a visit to the celebrated Hill o’ Many Stanes (“hill of many stones”), about 9 miles south of Wick. It’s a Bronze Age site, with some 200-odd small upright stones more or less arranged in rows.

There are many ancient monuments dotted around the Caithness countryside and, to be honest, some of them are more impressive than others. At first sight, this one’s a little underwhelming, even after walking round it and staring at it for several minutes. I’d hoped that it might spell a very rude word if you caught it from the right angle, or work like one of those magic eye pictures, but no such luck: it’s basically just a bunch of rocks in a field.

Rhodion by Elizabeth Freeman

But the people who lived here several thousand years ago took the trouble to stick 200 stones in the ground in this arrangement. Was it a prehistoric observatory? A rockery? Bronze Age art?

I’ve been re-reading one of my favourite novels by the late Iain Banks, The Crow Road. In it one character tells his children a story about the origin of ancient Scottish cairns: once upon a time there were giant mammoth-like creatures (called “mythosaurs”) that swallowed great stones to keep in their crops, like geese do with pebbles to break down their food. When the creatures died, their bodies decayed leaving only the stones, which we call cairns.

You decide . . .

Isn’t that great? There are many reasons to love Iain Banks, but that’s one of my favourites. And so, in the same vein, I’ve been wondering what might have caused the Hill o’ Many Stanes: flying reptiles dropping rocks on rabbits? A pixies’ cemetery? Someone who noticed the flat landscape of Caithness and thought you could grow mountains like potatoes? A baby troll day care centre massacre when they were all cut down by the sunlight in the middle of a group tai chi lesson…? The truth is out there, people; or if not the truth, something much more fun.

Finally this week, Margaret has been making another of her beautiful lacy shawly creations. At least, I think that’s what it is. I thought at first it might be an elvish fishing net, but I’m slowly coming round to the idea that it’s lingerie for Galadriel…

Bah – another autumn, another cold. (This is, of course, one of the occupational hazards of working with the public, typhoid Maries to a man and woman, but short of asking our researchers to go through a decontamination process before entering and wearing a sterile suit like a cross between an astronaut and the Michelin Man, there’s not much we can do.)

Faced with a cold, we all have our favourite remedies to get us through the day. Mine is paracetamol and codeine tablets, which act on my brain much like a defibrillator on a heart attack victim. (I probably shouldn’t shout “Clear!” before I take them, though.) Problem is, the tablets are soluble, and a sort of milky residue floats on top and can stick to the lips; so the unwary drinker ends up walking around with a ghastly white smile, like Jack Nicholson made up as the Joker (and here’s Gordon, modelling this year’s archive look, “creepy undead undertaker”).

The pills do weird things to my sleep, too – some of my recent dreams have included walking through a house which contained a total vacuum, being impaled with a stake through the heart by a vampire, and watching a giant machine dredge mashed potato out of Wick harbour.

Now, I’ve got a question for you. We’re running out of space on our server, which I assume means that the internet is finally filling up. So we have to prune our orchard, as it were, and we’re thinking of converting some of the archived blogs into e-book format (and hopefully hard copy publish-on-demand too) and making them available on Amazon, before gradually deleting them from the site.

There are two ways we can do this. One way is to package the blog posts by gansey, so each gansey would in effect be a separate book, complete with photos, pattern charts and the blog posts that covered the knitting thereof. The other way is to have (a) one book for all the instructions and pattern charts and photos, and (b) another book (or series of books) for an anthology of blog posts.

Any thoughts?

At the river

Meanwhile, owing to colds, laziness, and a delightful visit from Song of this parish and her partner Chris, I haven’t got a huge amount of knitting done this week. But I have finished the first tree, so all you have to do is imagine another 6 of them on top of each other, and then come back again after Christmas.

In parish notices, Nigel’s sent me some pictures of the progress to date on his gansey, which you can see here. It’s a very effective combination of Flamborough patterns, and I’m sure you’ll all join me in wishing him well for the next stage, dividing front and back.

Now it’s time for some more medication, and I expect some more weird dreams. You know, when Yeats said, Tread softly because you tread on my dreams, I really don’t think it was mashed potato he had in mind…

The view from Tesco car park on a good day . . .
(translation for Americans: The view from the supermarket parking lot on a good day . . .)

. . . and the view on a bad day

So here we are: the pullover is finished, and what a great pattern it is. I finally decided to extend the cuffs to 6 inches, so they can be rolled back to suit and give the wearer a bit of flexibility. The loose ends have all been darned in (at least with Frangipani 500g cones there aren’t too many), so now it just has to be washed and blocked and it’s ready to go. And after a short break it’ll be time to think about the next.

Now, as you know, I’ve been up to my elbows in the history of Wick’s Victorian fishing industry lately – and one of the things I’ve been wondering about is, just what was the impact of thousands of immigrants (‘strangers’) descending on the town for two months of the year.  You see, Wick is (and was) an English-speaking town; but many of the migrants came from the (Gaelic-speaking) Highlands and Islands. You never read about tensions between the two communities, so when I came across this extraordinary incident from 1859 it was all the more surprising.

It all started trivially enough, as is so often the case. About 7pm on Saturday 27 August two boys, one a local from Wick, the other from Lewis, got into a fight over a dropped orange. At that time the streets were packed with both incomers and locals; within a few minutes the brawl became general, as each side leapt to the defence of their own, and quickly developed into a full-blown riot. The police arrived and made a few arrests, including a Highlander who was thought to be the ringleader, and who was taken to the gaol in Bridge Street.

The incensed Highlanders at once besieged the gaol and tried to get the man released (one crew even went down to the Harbour and returned with the mast of their boat to use as a battering ram!). But the police had meanwhile recruited a number of local youths as special constables and armed them with batons, and together they broke up the crowd, and repulsed a later attempt to break through to the gaol.

The trouble died down that night, and everything remained calm throughout Sunday. But the Highlanders were only biding their time – for, as the harbour master noted, the police had armed “many of the thoughtless lads of the place” with batons on Saturday, and now their furious victims wanted revenge.

They got it on Monday. “Numbers of the Highlanders thronging Bridge Street and threatening vengeance against the parties using the batons on Saturday evening … upwards of 22 persons struck and abused before 6 pm, no available force able in any way to check the violence offered.” As evening came on, however, the Highlanders, having had their revenge, were “now willing to enter upon armistices.”

There followed a temporary suspension of hostilities, though “the Highlanders continue very sullen, looking daggers at parties who escaped them yesterday.”  The helpless authorities sent for the army, and meanwhile, with the fishing season nearing its end in any case, some of the Highlanders began to leave for home.

Next Saturday 100 soldiers arrived by steamer and it looked as if the trouble was finally at an end. But later that night the Wick youths went on the rampage, running through the streets with knives and stabbing any Highlanders they found out of doors. The military were called out and it took them two hours to “scatter the rebels”, by which time 11 people had been stabbed, some of them badly wounded, though luckily no one died.

The Wick harbour master wrote sadly in his diary next day, Monday, 5 September 1859: “The Highlanders leaving the town in great numbers, others making ready, the men have no confidence after the usages to which they have been subjected, in terror of their lives for several nights past.”

It’s hard to imagine that relations between the Highlanders and the people of Wick would ever be the same again after that, isn’t it?