Gansey Nation

As we inch our way slowly into autumn, Caithness is experiencing something of an Indian summer—always assuming the Indians enjoyed mostly cloudy summers of about 16ºc. But some days, like today (Sunday), are really rather beautiful: the wind drops, the sea turns flat calm, the clouds vanish and the astonishing blue sky goes all the way to the top.

In odd moments—and most of my moments are odd, now I come to think of it—I like to play the game of imagining what records I’d save from our archive if there was a fire. (Not that it’s likely—besides, I’m not allowed matches after The Unpleasantness.) And I think out of all our thousands of documents I’d dive into the smoke to rescue the log books of the Wick harbourmasters.

They form a daily record of events in the harbour—the weather (cold, wet), the wind (cold, windy) and the fishing. All human life is there. Let me give you two examples—one a tragedy, the other not so much.

Under those trees somewhere . . .

The first is from January 1858 relating to a fisherman who drowned just round the coast from here: “A small yawl boat with two fishermen left this harbour in the afternoon on purpose to go a-fishing to the southward of the South Head. The inhabitants of Old Wick heard cries about 7 P.M. as of people in distress, but nothing more was heard of them.”

The Lighthouse

Next day there is another entry: “The small boat reported yesterday as a-missing was found this morning driven ashore by the Old Man of Wick without oars or any appearance of the two men … [who] have doubtless met with a watery grave.”

Sure enough, the body of one of the men, William Miller, was washed up at Old Wick a month later; the other, as far as I know, was never recovered. William’s grave is somewhere in the parish churchyard but when Margaret and I went to look for it we found the graves overgrown and the headstones illegible.

It’s a melancholy tale, and I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot. William Miller was a living, breathing person who walked the streets of Wick; we know he had a wife (Catherine) and four children—and now he’s almost disappeared from history, first in life and now in death. Except for the record in the log book.

Well; I said it was tragic. Meanwhile, as well as brooding on the fragility of human life, I’ve been knitting—this counts as multitasking for me—and I’ve finished the first sleeve and started the second. I picked up 144 stitches around the armhole and gradually decreased them until I had 84 at the cuff. The rate of decrease worked out at 2 stitches every 5.5 rows, so as an experiment I decreased alternately every fifth row and every sixth down the sleeve. I’m delighted to say that it all worked out exactly—though whether it will fit, only time will tell.

As for my second example from the harbourmasters’ log books, it’s from June 1855, when gas lighting was just being installed in the town: “The supply of gas to the Light House being very little this few nights past, the Light Keeper called upon the Gas Man and they went together to see what was wrong. As the Gas Man was unscrewing a portion of the meter the escaping gas came in contact with a lighted candle when a sudden explosion took place, burst the pipe and singed the Gas Man’s whiskers.”

History, alas, doesn’t record if the gas man’s name was Mr Laurel or Mr Hardy…

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.]