Gansey Nation

If Doctor Who had decided to give up skimming through space and time and basically showing off, and instead decided to settle down in the far north of Scotland and convert the Tardis into a cross between a pawnshop and an antiques shop, he might have ended up with something remarkably similar to the wonder that is Wick Heritage Museum.

Wick St Fergus Church

Like the Tardis it is deceptively small on the outside. But once you start to explore inside you find there are always more stairs, more galleries, more unexpected levels, and each one crammed with a riot of objects and photographs. You may not travel through space—but you do through time.

I was there as part of a visit from a local school learning about World War Two. We told them about the bombings; and Harry Gray, who has lived through more of Wick’s history than I’ll ever know, told a great story about a tailor who was working upstairs in his shop when the bomb exploded—the floor collapsed and after the dust had settled he found himself standing on the ground floor, thimble and fabric in hand, but with his trousers completely blown off. Highlight of the museum for me is, of course, the gallery devoted to the fishing industry.

Smokey wonders how to get down…

They have a colour film from the 1930s showing the trawlers chugging into the harbour for the season, Lerwick and Buckie and Yarmouth boats, the harbourmaster pointing each one where they should berth. Workers heft sacks of coal and carry them onboard over a single long plank that makes tightrope bicycling look like a safe occupation. And there are the fisher lassies, the gutters, gutting and packing herring faster than your eye can follow, an endless blur of knife and hand and silver fish, some of them confident enough to grin shyly at the camera while they work (something I couldn’t have done and still been able to count to ten afterwards).

In my own gansey I have divided for the front and back, put the half-finished gussets on holders, and am romping up the back, which I will finish in a few days. The armhole will be eight inches from gusset to shoulder strap. This will be another gansey with a traditional collar, so I will not be indenting the neckline and both sides will be identical.

Somewhere in America. (Probably.)

By the way, I should issue a disclaimer: Margaret’s still in America, so cannot be blamed for any of the photos this week (with one exception—see if you can guess  which it is).

Incidentally, after the schoolchildren had left the museum I got talking to Harry and told him how much I enjoyed his story about the tailor. There’s a spot of mischief in him: he said that on these occasions he usually asks the children to draw the tailor after the explosion—only for some reason they always depict him with his boxer shorts intact…

Less than ten miles south of Wick lies the extraordinary archaeological landscape of Yarrows, a flattish, undulating, mostly empty moorland covering several square miles of geography and some seven thousand years of history. (Yes, it’s time for another instalment in our occasional series, “A Bunch of Stones Lying in a Field”.)

The broch & Loch Yarrows

People have been living here since the Stone Age, c.5,000 BC, and there are cairns and hut circles and even a standing stone, a narrow blade that sticks up like the gnomon on a sundial. On Saturday we just went down to Loch Yarrows to look at the wonderfully atmospheric Iron Age broch overlooking the loch.

This was our second visit. The first time we were defeated by the world’s most spectacularly useless information board: a study in abstract art, it depicts the trail without reference to actual landmarks, or even what you might expect to see. (It’s probably a hangover from the war, when it was originally put up to obfuscate invading Nazi archaeologists.)

Huh?

The way to the broch lies across several fields occupied by a stud farm, where ponies cluster as thick as midges; they have a strategy based on Jurassic Park’s velociraptors where one distracts you to the front, and while you stroke its forehead another two go through your pockets looking for apples, or failing that your wallet.

Abandoned buildings, Loch Brickigoe

It’s a stunning location, desolate and wild, and so flat you can see across Loch Yarrows, over Loch Hempriggs, and all the way to the sea beyond. The broch is ruined now, little more than foundations and an overgrown mound of stone. You have to watch your step, too—I mistook a grass-covered watery ditch for solid ground and next thing I knew I was about three feet shorter, with a cold, wet sensation spreading upwards from the region of my socks.

Riverside path at sunset, Wick

And the Scarborough gansey is finished, my fifth completed this year, with just the washing and blocking to go. I’m particularly pleased with the sleeves (18.5 inches plus 3-inch cuffs of 84 stitches), which seem to be a good fit around the forearms and wrists. It’s interesting that there are so few gansey patterns like this where the yoke isn’t divided horizontally or vertically into panels or bands. I wonder why that is? It’s certainly very effective.

As for the broch, it’s strange to think that people were living there when Jesus was alive. They don’t seem to have been knitting, though: I always tend to think of knitting as something that must have started about the time the first humans wondered what to do with all the leftover bits from mutton, but apparently not. Knitting as we know it dates from several centuries later, which raises the question: what did on earth they do in the long Caithness winter evenings?