Gansey Nation

If you ask an archaeologist who created the ancient stone cairns that dapple the landscape around here, they will tell you it was Neolithic people; if you ask them why, they will cheerfully throw around words like ritual, ancestors, sacred, and the like. But they are, in fact, wrong: I can now reveal that cairns were created by swarms of midges as traps for unwary sightseers.

We discovered this on Saturday when we paid a visit to the remote Cairn of Get at Ulbster, a few miles south of Wick. I’m suffering another of my summer colds and, looking for somewhere not too strenuous to explore, was misled by the directions which said it lay just a mile from the car park. Unfortunately the mile was on the vertical axis, not the horizontal, and we were soon scrambling up muddy hillsides (Caithness has hills; who knew?) and squelching through boggy marshes.

A heavy mist had descended, the kind you see on those late-night movies featuring promiscuous teenagers who’ve lost their way and are about to encounter assorted zombies or werewolves, possibly brandishing chainsaws. Landmarks, including the helpful posts to guide our way, vanished. But at last we found the cairn, set in the very apex of the hill’s crown, bulging up like the bridge on top of the Starship Enterprise, or the cherry on a bakewell tart.

It’s a stunning location high above Loch Watenan, nothing for miles but fields and sheep and peat bog and heather; and silent, just the birds and the wind. But when we entered the shelter of the cairn the midges sprang their ambush. In seconds we were smothered in dancing clouds of tiny insects, so that the air seemed to boil around us. It felt like having pins and needles everywhere at once. I brushed my forehead with my sleeve and it came away a black smudge; a tickle in the ear resulted in excavations like Sherlock Holmes cleaning out his Meerschaum pipe.

A signboard near the entrance said that skeletons had been found inside, and speculated that Neolithic residents had used the cairn for ceremonial burials. But this is, I fear, erroneous: it was midges, tiny airborne piranhas. Realising that if we lingered archaeologists would have two more sets of bones to theorise over, we hurriedly retreated to the safety of lower levels.

In gansey news, I have finished Side A, turned the record over and started Side B (as this is going to be another traditional collar there is no front and back). I had intended to knit another couple of plain rows before starting the shoulder rig ’n’ fur, but the pattern creates a sort of elastic stretchy tension in the yarn. The armhole should measure 8 inches from the end of the gusset to the start of the shoulder strap, but when I checked it was anything between 7¾  and 9½ inches, depending on how far I stretched it, so I chickened out and decided to stop there. It won’t look quite as elegant, but on the other hand it mayn’t hang down to my knees.

As for the cairn we visited, every time I drive along the A99 and pass the sign I can’t help thinking of the Beatles’ track I’m So Tired, in which John Lennon wittily sings, “I’m so tired, I’m feeling so upset / Although I’m so tired I’ll have another cigarette / And curse Sir Walter Raleigh / He was such a stupid get.” “Get” is of course a Scouse variant of the British slang insult “git”, meaning a stupid or contemptible person. I like to think that the cairn was named after a disagreeable Stone Age chap: though, to be fair, The Cairn of the Cantankerous Old Git wouldn’t look quite so good on the tourist signs…

[Apologies to Judit: I should have mentioned last week that she has finished her glorious green gansey. Here it is in all its glory! And many congratulations again to her.]

The funfair’s back, down by the Riverside—you can almost see it from our house, and judging by the flashing lights and pounding music every evening it’s as if the spaceship from Close Encounters has landed in Wick. (Apparently a signal transmission containing Saturday Night Fever has just reached their home world, and now they’re trying to communicate with the citizens of Earth using the music of the Bee Gees…)

I’m not a big fan of funfairs, to be honest. The rides always make me feel like I’m trying out for NASA moon landings, while the overall experience feels like a tawdry Las Vegas theme park in a damp field with added sheep. (Mind you, if I ever did find myself in Las Vegas I’d probably experience sensory overload, and the medical team would have to bathe my temples with lavender water and read Proust to me while I listened to Wagner in a darkened room until I recovered.)

The view up the river

Meanwhile the latest gansey has rolled off the production line, polished and sparkling and ready for a test drive. I must say, I’m really rather chuffed with it: not only for the pattern, which is an instant classic, nor the thrift of reusing old yarn (which was a bit of a pain); but it’s soft and chunky and comfortable, and it already feels like I’ve had it for years, a good sign.

I’ve started the next gansey, a classic Scarborough pattern in Frangipani bottle green, but I’ll say more about that next week.

In other news, I went back to see the consultant at Inverness hospital about my swollen lips. In the last few months you’ll remember I’ve tried eliminating all the likely causes of an allergic reaction (cinnamates, sulphates, crisps, chocolate, etc.), and then reintroducing them—starting, purely in the interests of scientific research you understand, with chocolate—but the situation’s remained more or less the same: no major flare-ups of ulcers, but my lips are still rather puffy, my mouth still sensitive.

Grass seedheads and Valerian

The consultant poked and prodded, and asked me questions like “Have you been anywhere exotic?” (I told him I’d been to Northampton, but apparently that doesn’t count). We agreed it was probably an allergy, but he’s keeping me on his books a little longer as there’s just a remote chance it could still turn into something serious.

“Now, when you say serious,” I prompted. He affected nonchalance. “Oh,” he said, “you know. Tuberculosis.” At which point my eyes came out on little stalks like a snail’s and the nurse had to hold me down for a bit. (It’s absolutely not TB, of course—the odds were always vanishingly small, and are now even smaller; and as he said, if I develop it now it’d be so rare I’ll be famous ever after in medical textbooks—not exactly what I meant by wanting to see my name published.)

Well, I’ve got another six months before I can be safely discharged. In the meantime, meals have turned into a sort of culinary Russian roulette, never knowing which mouthful will prove the trigger for another outbreak. Hmm, I wonder—could Hotel Chocolat truffles be the cause? There’s only one way to find out…