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 St John’s Pool is a miniature marvel, a private nature reserve in the semi-remote north of Caithness. It’s basically a partially-flooded field next to the similarly-named but somewhat wetter St John’s Loch, and is apparently home to over 200 species of birds.
You drive up the single-track road a ways, occasionally plunging into hedgerows to dodge the huge camper vans wobbling towards you from the opposite direction (vehicles which sit on the narrow Caithness roads, in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine). The reserve is screened by a high wire fence, the sort that leads you to hope dinosaurs are secretly being cloned on the other side. As you approach the hide from the path you’re aware of the screeching of many birds, but it’s not until you enter the hide, a long wood cabin, take a seat and look out through the windows, that you appreciate the scale of it all.
 Sandwich Tern colony, with loch in the distance Just a few feet from you is a riot of birds taking off, alighting, preening, swimming, nesting, squabbling, strolling, bathing, sunbathing, flying, fishing, eating, mating, fighting and generally kicking up a row (not unlike a typical Saturday night in Wick, in fact). Somehow it all cancels out, and the overall effect is remarkably soothing, almost hypnotic. I sat and stared in a general sort of way—ornithology isn’t my strong suit, being able to distinguish a crow from a swan but not much in between—while Margaret took photographs; after ten minutes I looked at my watch to find that half an hour had passed while my mind had been otherwise engaged. (There was another couple in the hide when we went in, and I’m proud to say that we all coped with the potential awkwardness of meeting total strangers in a confined space in a very British way: we each just pretended the other couple wasn’t there.)
Two gulls and an Arctic tern perch on a hide In gansey news: progress. The front and back are finished, the shoulders joined and the collar completed. I’m now embarked on the sleeves, and expect to finish them in about a month. The original photograph, by the way, shows that the shoulders were joined with the seam facing inwards; not outwards, as I have done. I must admit, I’m not really a fan of the “seam down” look; though “seam up” always reminds me of a plastic moulded figurine that hasn’t been sanded smooth yet.
Ackergill Tower from Reiss Beach Oh, and I think I’ve finally figured out where my life went wrong. In short, I feel like a character from a PG Wodehouse novel transplanted into one by Thomas Hardy—a sort of Bertie Wooster of the D’Urbevilles or Psmith The Obscure. Or suppose Dostoevsky had written Eggs, Beans and Crime and Punishment, or The Brothers Fink-Nottle. (Not to mention Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Blandings Castle.) Though I don’t suppose it matters—so long as it’s got a happy ending. (What? Oh…)
 It’s the summer solstice this week, and the longest day. Not that we’d know it if we didn’t have a calendar: the days are mostly grey and damp and cold, and we have the lights and central heating on by 8.00pm. And now there comes the gentle incline down to winter again; I ask you, does this seem fair?
The solstice tends to attract druids the way strawberry jam attracts bees, though any religion that expects you to be up for four in the morning is asking for a Reformation in my opinion. The word “druid” is thought to mean something along the lines of “knowledge of the oak”—the Welsh for oak is derw—and this seems all very satisfactorily mysterious and pagan, until you actually stop and think about it for a minute. Luckily there’s a medieval manuscript in the National Library of Wales that sheds light on this:
Villager: Excuse me, Barry?
Druid (whetting his knife and drinking a mistletoe latte): Yes, Trevor, can I help you?
Villager: Well, it’s about all this “knowledge of the oak” business.
Druid: Yes?
Villager: Well, what knowledge would that be, exactly?
Druid: You are referring to the tree of the genus Quercus in the beech family, I take it?
Villager: That’s the one. I mean, there’s the oak, it grows. It doesn’t seem to need a user manual, know what I mean?
Druid: Well, they have spirally arranged leaves, some with lobate margins. A single tree will produce both male and female flowers.
Villager; I say, keep it clean. But, ah, it’s not exactly arcane knowledge, is it, if you catch my drift?
A bird in the bush Druid: Er—OK, well, did you know the acorns contain tannic acid?
Villager: Good point, good point. It’s just that I don’t quite see where you go from knowing all that, to telling us what to do and conducting human sacrifices every solstice.
Druid (laying aside his whetstone): Ah, I was hoping you’d ask that. Care for a magic bean?
Villager (suspiciously): What flavour?
In gansey news I’ve almost completed the front of the Wick pattern. Although it looks quite complex, there’s enough repetition to make it a relatively easy knit (though I doubt I shall ever come to love the horseshoe cables). I’ve developed a system where I make a screenshot of the chart, copy it to my iPad as an image, and read it line by line; keeping track of rows by a simple five-barred-gate notation in a notebook. If I’m lucky I hope to get the shoulders joined and the collar done this week, and then we enter the endgame of the sleeves.
A deer in the bush And the word “solstice”, of course, derives from the Latin for sun (sol) and stand still (sisto). There’s a great poem by Philip “Chuckles” Larkin, called Tops. Ostensibly it’s a superb depiction of the lifecycle of a spinning top; but it has many applications, to life, the universe and everything. For once I choose a less personal meaning: I always think of it at the summer solstice, it applies so perfectly to the spinning earth and the shortness of “summer’s lease”:
—And what most appals
Is that tiny first shiver,
That stumble, whereby
We know beyond doubt
They have almost run out
And are starting to die.
So, um, yes – ah, happy solstice everybody!
 There was one stunningly beautiful day last week when the clouds parted and the sun came out, the whole world looking as if the wrapping had just come off, everything was shiny and fresh and new. So we went up to Dunnet Head, the most northerly tip of mainland Britain. The parking area was heaving with camper vans and cars—curse you, North Coast 500—but up the hill the viewing point was comparatively deserted. It was glorious on the summit, all the kingdoms of the world laid before us, so that I kept expecting Satan to pop up and make me an offer; but he was probably too busy dealing with the aftermath of the Peterborough by-election and Trump’s state visit. It couldn’t last, of course, and next day the clouds rolled back—but just for a moment there it felt as though I’d found the missing piece in the jigsaw of the world.
Distant Mountains – looking towards Cape Wrath Dunnet Head was a military installation in World War Two, keeping a bleak watch over the Pentland Firth and the northern approaches. This week of course marked the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, with commemorative events in Britain and France. I had to stop listening to some of the accounts that were read out, they were so moving. But I’ve been reading up on the war, and I’d like to share with you a couple of stories from the summer of 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain. It’s well-known that many Polish pilots fought on the British side. Well, in one dogfight one of these Polish airmen had his plane shot down, and he bailed out. He came down in the middle of a tennis club. So with a certain amount of style he telephoned the RAF to let them know where he was and while he was waiting the club loaned him some whites and a racquet, and he whiled away the time thrashing the locals at tennis until a truck came to take him back to barracks.
Iris in Dunnet Forest On another occasion, another Polish pilot also had to bail out. But as he landed in some rural spot his parachute snagged in a tree, leaving him hanging there. A hostile crowd of locals soon gathered, many brandishing pitchforks, assuming he was German. Someone produced a shotgun and shouted in German, “Hände hoch!” (hands up). In desperation the Pole shouted back some of the few English words he knew: “Fuck off!” As soon as they heard this the crowd relaxed and went away smiling, saying, “It’s all right, he’s one of ours!”
 Yoke side chart TECHNICAL STUFF
With the Scarborough gansey completed, it’s time for Donald Murray’s pattern to shine. The gansey has my standard stitch count of 336 stitches for the welt, increasing to 368 for the body. The body has the typical Wick ribbing; in this case, panels of 7 plain stitches alternating with a ribbing of purl-knit-purl-knit-purl-knit-purl. The purpose was doubtless to pull the gansey tighter in to the body, but I must admit I don’t enjoy knitting it: I can never get it to flow naturally—it feels like being kept in after school to do lines, somehow.
 Yoke centre chart The original has a central border panel to separate the body from the yoke, a diamond trellis (not shown). But the original is knit for a much smaller frame than mine, with finer yarn on smaller needles; I just don’t have enough rows to fit everything in, or the gansey would come down to my knees. But by losing that central panel the number of rows for the yoke pattern on the original is a pretty exact match for the number of rows I need to fit me—about 140 rows from the start of the yoke to the start of the shoulder. For the width, I had to make a small increase in the number of stitches (the original number would have been too tight); but by expanding the moss stitch side panels and widening one of the horseshoe cables, I was able to get it to add up without resorting to a calculator. And how stunning these Caithness patterns are, a sort of missing link between, say, the ganseys of Yorkshire and those of the Hebrides. Even by manipulating the scale like this, I’d count them among the most impressive I’ve knit, and they really do deserve to be better known.
  Just when I think I have Caithness figured out, I always discover something new—an unexpected crink of coast, perhaps, or a hidden bay—and now, it turns out, a castle. I’m still taking this in: after living here for eight—count them, eight—years I’ve just come across an actual ruined castle I’d never heard of. The ruins are what’s left of Forse Castle, just 17 miles south of Wick. It’s another of those wonderful castles-perched-on-a-narrow-promontory-jutting-out-into-the-sea, with which Caithness abounds. It’s a mile or so off the main road, not signposted, and you’d never know it was there.
There’s not a lot of it left, to be honest—just part of the keep and a few crumbling walls. Nor does it have much of a recorded history: there’s been a castle there since 1200, apparently, but the current ruins date from the 14th/ 15th centuries. It was abandoned around 1660 in favour of a mansion house a few miles inland. (This probably wasn’t a tough decision: on the one hand, a cramped and exposed castlette; on the other, indoor plumbing.) But you’d surely miss that view—the wide glittering ocean, the broad sweep of bay and nothing between you and God’s heaven but a few vague streaks of cloud.
 The Castle and its pebble-shored bay Well, in gansey news I’ve finished the Scarborough jumper, and it’s washed and blocked and drying in the patches of sunlight that glide across the living room floor. (For reasons I won’t go into here I set myself the target of using up my stash of one particular dye lot of Wendy navy this summer, three ganseys’ worth: that’s two down, one to go.) Now that the Scarborough is out the way, the Wick gansey’s going to take precedence for a while; at least until the complex yoke pattern is completed. I have a bunch of pattern charts to share with you, but I think I’ll leave them to next week when you should be able to see the completed back in all its glory.
 Another view of the cove Incidentally, when I was researching the castle I learned it originally had a “barmkin”. This splendid Scots word was new to me. It means – not a diminutive simpleton, as I’d hoped, but a lowish wall enclosing a small castle or other fortified places. (Apparently there’s a hill fort in Aberdeenshire with the outstanding name of The Barmekin of Echt. Isn’t that great?) “Forse” itself is from Old Norse for a waterfall. I haven’t seen any sign of a waterfall round there yet; but this being Caithness I suspect it’s only a matter of time.
 As others have pointed out, some of the most evocative words in the English language are Over the hills and far away. They conjure up images of exotic, distant places, coupled with a subtle yearning, like the faint tang of the sea on the breeze. Far away could be anywhere; and anything could happen there, anything at all. It’s the restless mood of the jaded Water Rat in the Wind in the Willows, when he meets the wayfarer rat who spins him alluring and seductive tales of mediterranean adventure.
There’s a wonderful equivalent in a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson called “A Mile and a Bittock“. It’s written in Scots, and the opening couplet sets the scene perfectly:
A mile an’ a bittock, a mile or twa,
Abune the burn, ayont the law,
 Flowers of the Forest – bluebells in Dunnet Forest Isn’t that great? In modern English it means, “A mile and a little bit, a mile or two / Above the stream, beyond the hill” but of course you lose so much in translation. (Actually the spellcheck on my computer keeps trying to change “bittock” to “buttock”, but that is, I fear, a rather different poem altogether…) I first came across the poem set to music by the Scottish folk group the Battlefield Band, on their 1982 album There’s a Buzz. (They added a chorus and called it “Shining Clear”, and I’d strongly urge you to track it down if you can.) It’s full of memorable lines: for instance, every time I hear the dawn chorus I think: An’ the birds they yammert on stick an’ stane, / An’ the müne was shinin’ clearly!
Well, it’s a Bank Holiday weekend, and a non-metaphorical deep depression has settled in on Wick: it’s 7ºC outside, cold, windy and wet. We need the rain; even if the tourists look like they wish they’d kept the receipt and could ask for their money back. So I’ve had a few days indoors to indulge myself, listening to Scottish folk music and knitting. As a result, the Scarborough gansey is now just a few days’ short of completion, which will happen sometime this week. The Wick gansey is also settling into its pattern, now that the gussets are perhaps 3/4 done. I’m also getting the hang of the horseshoe cables (by which I mean I no longer bend my cable needle into a horseshoe trying to force the twists…).
And while Stevenson’s poem is ostensibly an ode to moonlight drinking in the countryside, it’s really a celebration of good fellowship and friendship. Here’s the last stanza, enough to make me wish I was up there with them: over the hills and far away. (How far? Not very. Just a mile and a bittock, a mile or twa’…):
 A mile and a bittock – Stroma & Orkney from Warth Hill, Caithness O years ayont, O years awa’,
My lads, ye’ll mind whateter befa’ –
My lads, ye’ll mind on the beild o’ the law,
When the mune was shinin’ clearly.
[yammert = clamoured; ayont = beyond, beild = shelter, mune = moon; but you knew that already, didn’t you?]
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St John’s Pool is a miniature marvel, a private nature reserve in the semi-remote north of Caithness. It’s basically a partially-flooded field next to the similarly-named but somewhat wetter St John’s Loch, and is apparently home to over 200 species of birds.
