Gansey Nation

By way of variety this week I thought I’d share with you an extract from Iain Sutherland’s book on the Fishing Industry of Caithness (2005). It’s about ganseys, of course, and I think it’s interesting because it’s written from the perspective of a historian, not a knitter:

“The visiting fishermen all wore ganseys, which varied from area to area, with the Highland fishermen the most distinctive of all. They wore the Highland bonnet, which was similar to a Tam o’ Shanter, and their dress ganseys had a distinctive pattern knitted into them. Every fisherman had at least two kinds of gansey, one for working in and the other was a dress gansey for any social event, including the kirk.

Nybster Harbour in fog

“The work ganseys were knitted round with thick wool, very plainly, and had no buttons on which a net could catch. The sleeves were knitted short and stopped in mid-forearm with deep cuffs down to just above the wrist to keep in the warmth and to prevent the chafing if the sleeves got wet. Similarly there was a deep midriff to grip the area around the kidneys and to keep their backs warm. The dress ganseys were where their wives really showed what they could do with knitting needles, and nearly every port had its own patterns which usually involved the Horn of Plenty, cable stitch, an anchorage, the shore, all knitted round on needles so fine that the knitting looked like weaving.

Mervyn’s Tower at Nybster – a gansey in stone?

“They also had certain button arrangements, grouped on the shoulder, which could be undone to stop the neck from stretching when the gansey was being taken off or on. Most Highland fishermen wore horn buttons, which appeared white, and fishermen from the east coast wore their buttons in groups of up to four on either shoulder. Wick fishermen usually had four evenly spaced on the left shoulder while others could have groups of two, three and one, so that the home port of most fishermen could be identified at a glance if they were wearing their buttons. The buttons on their ganseys could sometimes identify the origins of a drowned fisherman.” [Sutherland, p.103]

I hadn’t come across the information on buttons before, and, leaving aside the water-muddying reference to identifying drowned fishermen (let’s all agree not to go there), even if was only in part a “rule”, it shows that there’s always something more to gansey lore than one may think.

With regard to the gansey cardigan, we had friends up for the weekend so I wasn’t quite able to get it finished: just a few more inches to go. The first step will be to get it washed and blocked, and after that—coming soon—the be-steekening!

The end of April in the North Highlands of Scotland is noteworthy for two striking phenomena: first of all, the hillsides are awash with flowering gorse, a stunning display of bright yellow that turns the countryside into something resembling the inside of a sickly god’s handkerchief; and secondly, of course, it’s my birthday.

Last week I celebrated my 57th year under heaven. Paul Simon once tried to imagine how terribly strange it must be to be 70; but I expect it will turn out to be much like 57, only with a few more parts missing—the damage, you might say, already having been done. I did worry that as I got older I’d have said everything I ever wanted to say; but as it turns out whole new topics of fascinating conversation pop up all the time: viz., medications, operations and what shows actors used to be in. (And did you know that the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album is 50 years old in June? Yes, I’m scared too.)

The gorse at Helmsdale

Bill Bryson once observed that the British are one of the happiest races on earth, because all it takes to make their day is a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit. In my case, I’ve discovered, it’s a new flat cap, a CD of Herbert von Karajan conducting Bruckner’s 7th symphony, music so transcendentally perfect it’s what God listens to on his iPod when he’s having a bad day; and a leather-covered notebook. (Well, yes, all right; and a cup of tea.)

Bench with a view

I’ve wanted a leather-covered notebook ever since I read PG Wodehouse’s masterpiece The Code of the Woosters. It’s what Gussie Fink-Nottle uses to record everything he dislikes in people. (“Have you ever heard Sir Watkyn Basset dealing with a bowl of soup? It’s not unlike the Scottish express going through a tunnel… Have you ever seen Spode eat asparagus? It alters one’s whole conception of Man as Nature’s last word.”) Of course I don’t use it to detail the foibles of my fellow men—there’s only 192 pages, after all—but I am using it to make notes on Caithness history, shaking my fist at the 21st century and writing by hand with a fine-nibbed fountain pen (though not both at the same time, obviously).

Waiting for Gordon

Speaking of Caithness history, I read today that the Earl of Cromarty and his son, Lord Macleod, who’d been recruiting for Jacobite cause in the county, missed the dreadful battle of Culloden because they stayed too long in the castle of Dunrobin “to watch the tricks of a juggler”, and were captured. Isn’t that great? (This is an excuse I now intend to use at work to explain my next missed deadline.)

In gansey news I am well down the first sleeve. Now that I’m back at work I have less time for knitting, of course, but I still hope to finish this one in a fortnight. The patterns are essentially the same as the body, except that the starfish are slightly smaller—the reason for this being that they will be on the forearms, in full view, and I didn’t want them to dominate the rest of the gansey’s patterns. (It’s possible I may be over-thinking this.)

I’ll post a chart next week if I remember—but as far as today’s concerned it’s a bank holiday, the sun is shining on the hills and somewhere in the distance I can hear a god sneezing…

Just a short blog this time, as it’s Easter weekend—and, let’s be honest, if we’ve done this properly we should all be far too full of chocolate to read a whole bunch of words and stuff. Anyway, it’s spring—the daffodils are expiring in a riot of yellow; the gorse has picked up the idea and run with it, as if God, looking over His paintbox after finishing the world, realised He had loads of cadmium yellow left over and decided to splash it all across the Highlands for a laugh; and out in the fields the lambs are—to use one of my favourite Scots words—friskling (in the sense of, leaping or frolicking: these are not Special Branch plain clothes lambs patting down other sheep for concealed weapons).

And now for the good news. Easter was ever the time of renewal and hope, and so it has proved for me: this week I received the All Clear from the doctors and am now preparing to return to work after my long illness. I’m not out of the woods yet—and I have to stick with the meds till the autumn just to make sure my serotonin levels come back up to strength—but compared with how I felt in December, this will do nicely. I don’t have a date to go back yet, but soon.

Of course it’s helped having something creative to keep me occupied these last few months, and I suppose three ganseys isn’t a bad return, not counting this one. I’ve finished the back and started the front, and hopefully I’ll get that done this week. As ever, this sort of pattern forces you to pay attention; it’s not the kind of thing I can do while watching television, for example. But the results are so stunning I start to wonder why I knit anything else.

In parish news, Judit has sent us this splendid picture of her brother wearing a gansey in cream. It’s the classic Filey lifeboat design, but for the whole gansey, not just the yoke, and perfectly realised, as ever. Many congratulations to Judit on an excellent gansey and excellent photograph.

Happy Easter everyone, and a happy Patriots Day weekend to all our friends in Massachusetts!

TECHNICAL STUFF (PART 3)

And so we come to the yoke. The classic Hebridean arrangement is three bands each on three pattern “squares”, making a total of nine squares. They don’t have to be, of course, but in this case all the squares are all the same size—it makes them interchangeable, and it’s easier to do the maths, too. My reasons for choosing these particular patterns was as follows.

I knew beforehand that I wanted to include the tree of life—it’s a strong design which looks good in cream, and is symmetrical so can be broken into two equal halves by the steek. This I decided to use to anchor the corners and be the centre. (Also, living in Caithness, we need all the trees we can get.)

Again, the diamond is an effective design and can be split in two by the steek (which is why they’re in the centre column), but it’s also quite a plain pattern. The overall design of this gansey is very busy, and I wanted to balance some of that busy-ness with plainer patterns, or it just gets too much, I feel.

Finally, the recipient has a connection with the sea so I wanted another nautical connection, hence the anchor. I didn’t have a pattern that exactly fit the size I needed, so I more or less made up my own based on the examples in Michael Pearson and Rae Compton’s books.

The cables and yarn over triangley pattern thingeys are more or less self explanatory, though I’ll just note that I’m flanking the cables with a 3-stitch seed stitch on each side. I don’t think I’ve done this before—I usually opt for 2 purl stitches either side of a cable—but this is, apparently a feature of the north of Scotland ganseys, and, although a wee bit fiddly, it does look effective. The ladders at either side of the body are a great regulating mechanism, and can be made as large or small as you like to fit the number of stitches required.