Subject: Scotland 8 of 10
Date: Thu, 20 Jul 95 11:12:00 PDT


We woke fairly early, had breakfast in a room filled with chimes, gongs,
and clocks that all said the wrong time or didn't tell time.  It was...
interesting.  The hostess dashed in and out with our food and other
items, and we didn't really talk with her much at all.  At checkout she
told us that everyone was readying for a local fair, which was why she
was so busy.  We left happily.

We'd checked places out the day before, in Kirkwall, so we putted over
there and executed our battle plan.  We parked out by the pier, at the
entrance of the Shopper's Alley, and marched in.

First was a kitch shop filled with really expensive stuff, glittery
tourist stuff that wasn't worth the light of day.

Further back into the alley we found an Orcadian crafts store.  The
store is old and cluttered and filled with brickabrack and a very big,
very solid old woman is behind the counter.  She said something in such a
strong accent there is no way I can make it out.  Luckily, she was
saying it to a man that's also behind the counter, working, with nimble
fingers on a hand woven basket.  The stores shelves were filled to
brimming with hand crafts, gloves, hats, scarves and shawls.  Lots of
shawls, simple and fine and not too elegant, but of the lace stitches
that I've seen over and over again.  Beautiful work but simple enough
that they're actually sellable.

I searched high and low and finally found the treasures low, nearly
underfoot, underneath a dense rack of sweaters.  A basket of cobweb and
lace weight yarns.  A single touch and I'm sure that they're NOT Jameson
and Smith, which is what I say to the woman behind the counter.

"This isn't Jameson and Smith is it?"

She laughs a laugh that is wry and amused and dry all in one.  "What is
it that tells you that?" is what I think she says.

"The hand's softer than J&S." I say.

"I had it specially spun from fleeces I sent the factory." she says.
"Ordered them done 'specially."

"Which factory did you have it spun at?" I asked

"They don't exist anymore, the factory that spun that thread. They don't
exist anymore."

"Wow." says I.  There are the five traditional colors.

"Shetland black is what we call this dark brown." she says as I bring
all the bundles forward.  I nodded, knowing that that was the darkest
natural color that appeared on sheep.  There is a bundle of true black
as well, and I get two ounces of that as well.  There is a tan and a
dark grey and a light grey as well as white.  I get a couple ounces of
each.  The oldest known traditional shawl pattern for the Shetlands is
having a plain, garter center in some grey or tan and then colored bands
out from the center with a pure white edging.  The center is supposed to
be the sea, the bands are supposed to represent the bands that the tide
leaves as it goes out, and the white is the foam.  Now I had the colors
to do such a shawl in a heavier weight yarn than I would normally work
with, but it was cool to get materials from nearly the source of the
original works.

I also found baskets full of Shetland shawl kits.  The old lady laughed
when she saw me at them, and basically told me that they don't sell
the kits on the Shetlands 'cause the women there don't buy 'em.  She
guessed that they made up their own patterns and had no need for printed
or published patterns.  So Jameson and Smith wouldn't sell the kits in
the Shetlands.  She'd had a customer come and tell her that she'd gone
all the way out to the Shetland islands and hadn't been able to find the
kits.  I didn't buy the kits, the patterns were ones that were published
in a book I'd seen and weren't traditional patterns, they were
modernized and I'd seen the book at the Weaving Works in the U District.
It turns out that they even have the J&S kits, themselves.  <grin>
There were also baskets of J&S yarn, and after handling them for a
moment, I decided not to bother.

I was quite happy with what we'd gotten when we walked out the door.
Looking back at the shop from further down in the alley, the window
facing further down was completely *filled* with skeins of yarn.  <grin>

There were two other shops we'd scoped out.  One was the Ms. Glue's Knit
Art Shop, which was filled with stockenette stitch artsey knits.  Some
of the colors were beautiful, but they were so... hmm... Artsey... we
couldn't bring ourselves to buy anything more than a Cat Hat for Cathie,
'cause she's so into cats and the hat was definitely her colors, rusts
and browns and golds.

The second was a knitwear shop that doubled as a Body Shop.  That was
cool.  They had skeins of yarn from the North Ronaldsay sheep, sheep
that lived on sea weed as well as their grass, so the wool had
interesting color variations.  They were also a primitive breed of
sheep, so still had the guardhairs.  Instead of roo'ing the sheep, as is
proper for the primitive breeds, they'd sheared 'em straight and spun
the yarn with the guard hairs in 'em, so the yarn was *hairy*.  It
looked really cool.  But when we compared the price of the yarn to the
prices of the already finished Fair Isle style sweaters (beautifully
finished and hand loomed) we decided that it'd be better for John to
just buy a sweater.  He put it on immediately, 'cause the weather had
turned cold and a bit wet and the sweater was wonderfully warm.

The Body Shop part of the store had stuff I hadn't seen in the U.S. Body
Shops and that was cool.  The store also had a walk-in closet filled
with beer brewing kits.  <grin>  Kinda an Everything Store, I guess.  We
bought a Scottish kit for one of John's brothers.

The rain started coming down, a low, slow drizzle of a rain just like
from Seattle, so we were used to it and had brought stuff for it, so it
was cool that we had all our stuff with us in the car.  I changed into
my Big Dogs sweatshirt with hood and was fine in the stuff.  We finished
all our shopping by 10am and got out of town about when a stream of cars
and people started moving in.  Perhaps for whatever festival the woman
had been talking about.

Winging vacations is cool.  It meant that as we drove out of town I saw
the sign, again, for an Orcadian Farm Museum and pointed at it and said,
"I want to go there." and John turned the car down the road towards the
museum.

It turned out to be on a working farm.  The parking lot was just a piece
of fenced off field, and 19th century farm houses stood next to 20th
century farm houses.  We were the only two people visiting.  An old man
collected our money at the tiny booth, and told us to have fun looking
around and he'd answer any questions we had.  He obviously loved the
place and he'd appear in sections of the farm as we walked into them.

Just out in front of the farm houses was a huge stack of dried peat with
lovely instruments of destruction in front of the stack.  He happily pulled
up one of the cutters and showed us how peat was traditionally cut, at about
this season, and how, when it was wet like this, it would cut 'just like
black butter' under the blades.  The peat was then tossed up on the heather,
allowed to dry for a couple of weeks, at least until it had a skin on it,
and then it would be stacked to dry for the summer and burned during the
winter.  Not a particularly efficient heat source, but sufficient.

In the grain house, by the grinding stone was a hen with chicks, and the
man dug the chicks out from under the hen for us to pet.  I didn't tell him
that the last time I held a baby chick it was as part of biology experiment
in high school, where I was the only one in my group brave enough or hard-
hearted enough to be the one that injected all the chicks with various
hormones.  The chick peeped softly from within the gentle cage of my fingers
and its down was soft and silky against my skin and its tiny claws scritched
against my palm.  I petted it softly with a finger and it, like those
experimental chicks leaned against my finger, peeping happily.  I set it
down, eventually, and its momma gathered it under her wings.

One room had all the fiber crafts equipment in it, an old, cracked spinning
wheels, dried with age and disuse.  A huge, massive string heddle loom with
beams across it nearly bigger around then my thighs.  The wood pale and worn
smooth with usage and age, the string heddles tangled with disuse.  A rug
lay on it, still, with holes eaten by moths.

The houses themselves were built of stone.  The roofing material was made
up of giant flagstones that were simply laid on top with cement to chink the
cracks between them.  A roof that would last for just about ever.  The whole
structure was solid, and quite capable of lasting for centuries.

Each of the rooms had small, wooden paddles that held the history of the
room and its contents.  We saw box beds and various other things, and the
kitchen had a huge, nearly walk in fireplace, where a peat fire burned and
breakfast had been cooked on the still hot griddles that morning.  There was
also a baby crib by the fire, one rocker cracked and broken, and in it was
a black cat, sleeping on the straw in the crib.  The old man reached into
the crib, under the mother cat and pulled out two tiny, still blind, black
as bat kittens, handing one of the tiny creatures each to John and I.  The
kitten looked ludicrously tiny in John's hand, and I could hold mine with
just the one hand, and it curled up within the cup of my palm...  so tiny
and helpless.

He told us he was looking for a home for the kittens and we both kinda
smiled regretfully and said we were from the States and he just nodded and
smiled gently as I coo'ed softly over the tiny thing and stroked it until it
fell asleep again in my hand.  The rain fell softly outside.  The sound of
it lent a great deal to the coziness of the rooms.

There in the kitchen I looked on the back of one of the rocking chairs,
and there was a very old, age paled shawl of many colors.  It had the garter
stitch center, and the old shale pattern of outreaching colors on the border
and the white edging, now grey with smoke and age.  There were holes all
through it, and it was as thick as the yarn I'd bought, comfortable, warm
compared to the gossamer webs that I'd seen up to that point.  To see it in
that setting was to find it far more probable than the webs that were later
sold to wealthy noblewomen.

We then headed out, in the rain, to the north west corner of the island
as John wanted to see the Point of Buckquoy and Marwick Head.  A tiny
town was just east of the Point, and in that town were clean bathrooms
and the Earl's Palace.  We stopped 'cause we had to for the bathrooms,
but the Palace caught our eye 'cause there were workmen cleaning it up
with a hose and other washing tools.  It was the stone remains of a big
palace, just the bare bones of it, with no guard rails, no warning
signs, just full access to the architecture of it.  So we wandered about
it and climbed some of its solid walls with ground and a good 30 foot
drop to either side, and marveled at what it had taken to build
something like this.

The next stop we wanted to make was out to the Lighthouse on the Brough
of Birsay which could only be reached by a particular walkway across the
water between the main island and the island that the lighthouse was on.
The walkway was built so that it was only accessible for the four hours
around low tide.  In the wind and water of the rain, the view was
*wild*.  The spume of wind whipped waves crashing over the last bit of
the slender pathway from the mainland to the island made me wonder how
anyone could have walked that way even at low tide.  It was really cool
to see, and, someday, maybe we'll get to walk it as well.  Kinda cool to
see something like that outside of stories, for real.

We then drove to the trail head to the Kitchener Memorial, which stood
in the middle of the Marwick reserve on Marwick Head.  A van load of
kids went before us, and we saw their colorful coats as they headed up
the trail well ahead of us.  A sign at the trail head said that it was
about a mile and a quarter to the memorial.  The rain was steady at that
point, so we bundled ourselves up in rain gear, but the rain still
worked its cold, wet way through the cracks.  The beginning of the hike
was pretty much straight up along the edge of several farmer's pastures
on a trail that was turning into mud with the steady rain.

It was actually quite beautiful.  The infinite variation of greys in the
sky, the curtain of the rain on the brilliant green of the spring grass,
and the sound of the rain muffled everything, made everything more
private, especially within the enclosure of the rain hood and gear.  My
thoughts were my own, and with all the conditioning of the soccer that
we'd played so much, the walk itself was nothing, pleasant, slow enough,
and there were birds to watch.

A multitude of sea birds, in brilliant colors, on a huge variety of wings,
with body structures as distinctively different as the differences between
puffins and eagles.  Seagulls and pelicans stared at us, occasionally,
from the prosaic sheep's fields.  There were only a few over the pastures,
but the variety was fun... and as we hiked slowly further and further up,
there were gradually more and more of them.

Then we got to a gate at what looked like just the top of a hill.  We went
through the gate, took two more steps and we were on the edge of cliffs.
First words, honest injun, out of my mouth were, "The Cliffs of Insanity!!"

And they were.  Ragged cliffs so high and tall the waves at the bottom
looked as if they had to be made from wrinkled plastic and the sea birds
looked like nothing more than white pin heads wheeling and gliding along
the grey gravel at the feet of the granite cliffs.  No guard rail, of
course.  <grin>  We walked out onto a small piece of cliff right there,
across from the gate and I sat on the edge of this granite shelf and leaned
forward and just scared the hell out of myself.  But the view was utterly
breathtaking and not just from the height.  The cliffs are all textured,
pocked with niches and holes and strata, and all over them, making the walls
nearly crawl with how many of them there were, were sea birds of all sizes,
shapes and colors.

It was the Marwick Head bird sanctuary.

During the rest of the year, the cliffs are empty.  It's just during May
that all the sea birds come in off the sea and nest and have their young.
It's hatching season and the cliffs were crowded to nearly overflowing.  The
air was white with birds wheeling and diving and getting onto the walls and
diving off of them.  Wow.

After a long time of watching, we went back up to the trail and headed for
the dark grey tower of the memorial.  We read the plaque and then went out
on the headland.  Again... Wow.  <grin>  The view was for about 270 degrees,
and the shores to the left were closer to sea level, but from there we could
also see the miles and miles and miles of cliffs that extended to the right.
On all sides was the sea whipped into whitecaps by the wind and the rain.
The long, long walk in the miserable weather was made well worth it by that
view.  The kids appeared soon after and took off, back down the trail before
we did, and we eventually followed.

Once we were back at the car we stripped off all the wet layers and laid
them in the back of the car to dry.  We drove out to the Skara Brae,
which is the site of a village that was occupied between 3100BC to
about 2600BC, but there was quite a walk involved in seeing that as well,
so we drove on.  I was happy with but tired from the previous walk; the
rain was coming down harder than before; and we both were starting to
get hungry, so we decided to head back to Sterness to find a B&B and
then dinner.

On the way there, though, I saw that we were going to pass right by a
Cashmere farm that had been advertised on one of the flyers at the 'i'.
So we headed for it and found it, eventually, and a lady came by in the
rain and started taking us about.  It was lots of fun talking with her
about cashmere and about the state of Scottish and, in particular,
Orcadian farming and how they were looking for alternatives to sheep,
which really are hard on the land.  She was pretty clearly into it
'cause she loved the animals and didn't have a very good feel for what
it was like to run her farm as a business first.  She actually
apologized for her price on the dehaired cashmere when her price was
about a fifth of the price that I could get the same quality material in
the U.S.  I did manage to tell her that, explicitly and she looked a
little shocked.  But considering just how far out of the way her farm
was... it might actually have been a fair price.  I was comparing the
price of the cashmere at the Weaving Works to hers, and WW has all the
overhead of getting the stuff, the store, the cost of the mail order
service and all that... she just sells it straight.

It was fun 'cause she really wanted me to meet all the animals that the
fibers came from.  So I got to not only pet an incredibly soft cashmere
kid, but also went into the barn where they housed *all* the Cashmere
goats and got to pet them and meet them as well.  One really cool thing
was that they'd just gotten three North Ronaldsay lambs, and since I'd
expressed interest in colored wool, they took me to meet them.  They
were shy, fey sheep.

Most sheep are stupid and slow, and most domesticated lambs are a bit
like domesticated puppies, eager to get petted and happy to snuggle up
to people.  The North Ronaldsay lambs showed their feral roots and were
shy and nervous about getting touched or held. Their facial structure
was also very different than most domesticated sheep, their muzzles were
sharper, their faces narrower, and they watched everything that happened
around them.  That was really, really interesting to see.  One of the
tendencies of domesticated animals is that their muzzles get shorter and
their teeth get more blunt (yes, humans have domesticated themselves as
well) and it was startling coming directly in contact with this bit of
something that evolution left behind.

We left to much laughter and waving and a promise that I would come back
to show them what I'd made of the cashmere that I'd bought, if I could.

We drove back to Sternwall to find a B&B 'cause our ferry was going to
leave at 9 in the morning, so we'd have to be up early and in line
early, which meant that the closer to the dock we were the better.  We
found a beautiful, modern little place a bare quarter of a mile away
from the dock.  There were bathrooms for each room, and the place was
neat, clean, and lovely.  The hostess also had no problem with serving us
a very early breakfast and actually took orders for the kinds of
breakfast to be served.  John got the traditional, I picked a smoked
fish breakfast 'cause I hadn't seen that before.

We pitched all our stuff into the room and went out in the last of the
evening light.  First to the farm of Howe, but found that the excavation
was closed, along with its museum.  So we went back towards a pub we'd
seen along the road, for food; but I got distracted with the sight of a
ring of stones in a sheep's pasture.  So we stopped there, for a bit, and
John read the guide book to say that there were more further down the
road.  So we went there as well, passing by a huge standing stone called
the Stone of Odin, and onto the Ring of Brodgar, which had water on two
sides of it and farmer's pastures to either side.  It was about 8:30pm
and the sun was still up in the clouds as the rain drizzled down, but we
could see that the edge of the sky was starting to lighten.

The Ring of Brodgar is 125 yards in diameter, with, originally, 60
stones.  Around the edge of the ring was cut a HUGE ditch with two paths
that crossed the ditch and a few stones and howes laid out around the
edges of it.  The circle itself is filled with heather, except for a
ring of path/grass that encompassed all the stones.  The stones
themselves were all taller than me, some *well* taller and it was cool
'cause they had a placard next to a stone that was struck by lightening
in 1973 and had cracked and fallen and you could see that it had fallen
much as most of the other fallen stones had fallen.  There was water
both to the north west and south east of the stones, and the view, as
the sun started touching the western sky was a marvelous mix of
sky, earth, fire and water.

We went into the pub for dinner, a bit wetter for the wear, and
absolutely famished.  Normal pub fare, with chips, except for the sole
exception of an orange-carrot soup that was hot and lovely after the
cold and rain and really did taste entirely of oranges and carrots and
made for a surprisingly lovely savory soup.

We drove a bit more in the twilight, just looking at various parts of
the island, and then went back to the B&B for tea and cookies and a
little TV coverage of the upcoming Cup game.

----- end of 8 of 10 -----
Copyright 1995 by Phyllis L. Rostykus.  All rights reserved.