Wick (John MacLeod II): Week 14 – 10 April

It being Easter, and spring having finally arrived, a little rusted after all the rain, we took a trip up to John O’Groats. John O’Groats is famously the most northerly settlement on the mainland of Britain. (Dunnet Head, a few miles up the coast, is actually a little further north; but as it basically consists of a lighthouse on a headland, a scattering of fulmars and the odd puffin, and is a bit of a fag to reach, it doesn’t count.)

The Harbour, John o’Groats

Back in the day, visiting John O’Groats used to be a pretty bleak experience, especially in bad weather: after the first half hour or so of standing next to a sign telling you that it’s 3,230 miles to New York whilst a scouring wind drives the rain through your inadequate coat like radioactive particles, the novelty starts to wear off. But since they rebranded the coastal road that runs for 516 miles in a broad loop from Inverness and back round “The North Coast 500”, tourism is now very much A Thing. John O’Groats has been gentrified accordingly: there’s an ice cream shop, gift shops, cafes and even a “distillery experience”, whatever that may be.

The Mill near John o’Groats

What’s in a name? The story goes that John O’Groats is named after a Dutchman (Jan de Groot) who was awarded a contract by King James IV in 1496 to operate a ferry across the Pentland Firth to Orkney. Well, maybe: for something so specific there seems to be a shortage of documentary evidence. Did he really charge passengers a groat each, and is that really where the place’s name comes from? I hae ma doots. De Groot means “the large” (incidentally, the same root meaning as groat), so if he existed it seems more likely that the place was just named for him; though I must say, John O’Groats has a better ring to it than “Big John’s place…”

PARISH NOTICES

In parish notices this week we have another splendid gansey from Judit. It’s knit in a lighter shade which shows off the pattern perfectly. The pattern itself is taken from Rae Compton’s book, that of John Northcott from Cornwall. It’s a cousin to certain other Cornish gansey designs like The Lizard and the Vicar of Morwenstow, which are some of my all-time favourites, and it’s great to see these patterns being brough to life by Judit. So many thanks to her, and as ever many thanks for sharing them with the rest of us.

The mill stream

Finally, my own gansey project is almost finished, just the last bit of cuff to go. As usual when I’m knitting a gansey for someone else, I tend to double the length of the cuffs so that, when doubled back, the recipient has a bit of flexibility as to how long they want their sleeves to be. And if they don’t like them doubled back it’s easy enough to rip them back to their preferred length. The only downside is knitting five or six inches of ribbing when you’re already thinking of your next project…