I said last week that spring was in the air, and there are three more infallible signs to show that it must be true. First, and most obvious, in a few days we see the back of February, which has felt less like a month and more like the sorts of tests they put a car through to see how much punishment it can take. Secondly, this is the week I stop using my sunrise wake-up lamp, as it’s finally light enough at seven in the morning to navigate one’s way to the bathroom by sight instead of blindly ricocheting off objects in the hallway like an elderly pinball with arthritis. And thirdly, it’s warm enough that I no longer scream from the shock of applying freezing cold moisturiser to my face. Spring is, I think it’s fair to say, coiled to spring.
Noss Head from Nybster
Take Sunday. It was a simply glorious day: cold—between 3 and 6ºC—but the wind had dropped, the sun was out, and you could see for miles. We went up to Nybster broch, one of our favourite jaunts, just a few miles north of Wick. Nybster, by the way, like Lybster, is one of those Highland place names designed to catch out tourists. The y is long, like the y in “why”, so it’s pronounced Nye-bster. Other notorious places are Guidebest and Leodebest, which I’ve heard pronounced Gidder-best and Lee-odder-best, but I’ve never dared attempt them myself. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”, as Wittgenstein famously said when someone asked him how to pronounce Loch a’ Mhadaidh Beag.
Being observed by fulmar
Meanwhile, in gansey news I’m making good progress up the back—have nearly finished, in fact, for in about half an inch or so I’ll start the shoulder straps. The overall length of the gansey is to be 24 inches, so I’m making the armhole 8 inches (i.e., 16 inches in the round for the sleeve). In practice this will mean 7 inches plus one inch for the shoulder straps.
Snowdrops by the riverside
Nybster broch is perched on a knobbly outcrop on cliffs overlooking Sinclair’s Bay. Someone’s been busy clearing it over the winter, for it used to be mostly a lumpy, bumpy assortment of hillocks and holes (or “negative features” as archaeologists like to call them), but now the various chambers and passages are open to the sky. It looks like something built, a place where people could actually have lived, and not so much like somewhere colonised in prehistoric times by a now-extinct species of giant mole-rats. We stood there and watched the waves foaming in and the fulmars wheeling below us, and black shaggy-type things skimming over the sun-dappled water in the offing. I expect somewhere time was passing, though not where I was; and it occurred to me, for the first time, that eternity might not perhaps really be so bad, after all…
Nybster sounds fascinating, like a more accessible Skara Brae.
With Gaelic, I gather that most of the letters are silent, so… it starts with an M, has a couple of A’s and D’s, and the second part starts with B, so my guess for the loch name is “Mad-boy”.
The gansey is marvelous. All those diagonals, wow.
Hi Tamar, yes it reminded us of Skara Brae, and though it’s not as old, you still get that sense of presence of absent people. I’d love to see an animation of what it might have been like!
I learned with Welsh that Celtic languages don’t follow the phonetics of the romance and Germanic/ Norse languages. Gaelic Scrabble must be a pretty high-scoring game!
It is very strange how the shortest month feels like the longest, in an Alice in Wonderland sort of way.
Hi Caroline, as they say, it ain’t the years, it’s the mileage. We all put in some hard yards in February. The characters in Alice also seem to have way more fun than I’ve had this winter!