Gansey Nation

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.

No matter how thoroughly you’ve explored a place like Caithness there are always new things to discover. The other day I was talking to a visitor to the Archive about harbours and he said, “And have you been to the Bocht?” Well, not only had I not been to it, I’d never heard of it, nor did I even know how to spell it. But as he explained it’s a small abandoned harbour on St John’s Point, on the north coast between Mey and Gills Bay.

To get there you have to drive towards the hamlet of Skarfskerry, park the car by the side of the road and then cross a boggy waste of moorland. The land rises away from you, so it’s a bit of a trudge until you reach the crest and then the whole coastline eastwards as far as John O’Groats and Duncansby Head is suddenly revealed, with the islands of Stroma and Orkney tantalisingly close before you.

Caithness is, let’s face it, soggy. I’ve mentioned before how the ground underfoot feels like a carpet floating on a swimming pool; well, at St John’s Point it feels more like a tablecloth. Within a few paces I’d sunk to my calves, and a cold, brown, slimy liquid began to insinuate itself into my socks. (Hence the county’s tourism slogan: Caithness—putting the quag in mire for over 10,000 years.) We might’ve stayed dry if we’d worn deep-sea diving suits, but I doubt it.

The Bocht, one of those splendid Scottish names that sounds like a Highlander expectorating, is also known as Scotland’s Haven, and it’s quite beautiful, as though Caithness had its very own lagoon. You could imagine it as the headquarters of a James Bond supervillain, with the water sliding back to reveal a rocket launching pad underneath. In fact, as we looked some of the rocks along the sides of the bay seemed disconcertingly to move, until we realised they were basking seals. At such moments time and space cease to apply and all you can do is stand and stare in a dazed sort of wonder. It’s almost—almost—enough to make you forget that your trousers are experiencing a sort of capillary motion and icy peat water is now being transferred up from your socks to your groin in a way that is frankly disturbing.

It’s been a slightly curtailed knitting week, so not a huge amount of progress on the gansey, as we’re off down to visit my family in Northamptonshire again. The good news is, I’ve taken the gansey with me and expect to get it finished in the next few days; the bad news: there won’t be a blog next week. So: happy knitting everyone, and we’ll see you when we get back.

Scotland’s Haven

Gansey Nation will return on Monday 23 October.