Reading this week:

• An Outline of Shetland Archaeology by John Stewart

As my super amazing wife describes it there can be a divide between the wool-producing community and the wool-using community. She loves wool in all its forms and her parents also raise sheep, so she bridges the divide, but I am always a little amazed at knitters who don’t quite know how sheep work and farmers who don’t quite know how yarn works. One thing my super amazing wife therefore really appreciated is how much wool week worked to highlight the sheep producers to bring both sides of this industry together. And so our main activity for the day was a history-spanning tour of Old Scatness Broch and Laxdale Farm.

One anecdote before we really begin is that as my super amazing wife and I were milling around in the museum parking lot waiting for the tour bus, a lady spotted me and asked me if I could help put her car in reverse. Clearly rank sexism as I was the only man in the parking lot. But I did in fact know how to put her car in reverse because I drive a DeLorean and so I knew that sometimes you have to move the stick shift in the z direction. I felt like a hero. But before long we were off on the tour bus for the broch! We had a lovely tour guide, yet another import to Shetland herself, who gave us the rundown on everything we passed as we took the long drive down to the very southern tip of the mainland. She talked about how lovely she found Shetland, and how no one ever locked their doors. “How else would Amazon put the packages in your house,” she asked, while also noting she had never even gotten around to asking her landlord for the key to the backdoor of her house. We were also interested to learn that while there are elementary schools spread throughout the isles, for high school the government finds it cheaper to board students in Lerwick during the week and shuttle them back home every weekend than have a more decentralized system.

We arrived at Old Scatness having crossed the airport runway to get there. The site is right next to the runway so we would pause occasionally as a plane landed. The site would normally have been closed when we visited but Wool Week had put together a special tour, stunningly with the lead archeologist of the site herself. She had been working the site for 30 years. She describes being a young archeologist and her boss walking in one day and telling her “I bought you a broch” and she was like “why would you do that, no one studies those anymore.” But they have done some phenomenal archeology on the site, as it was utterly pristine before they figured out that natural hill wasn’t when they were putting in a road there. Significantly, the dating they did there proved that brochs originated in Shetland before moving down to Scotland, instead of the other way around as thought previously. They also found a cool Pictish carving of a bear.

It was indeed a really special tour. They are still working on stabilizing the site enough to let the general public sorta wander around unsupervised, so with our guide we got to scramble over some otherwise un-scrambleable spots. She didn’t have any solid answers on why all these brochs were built in the first place, but said it was best to think of them as castles which served several purposes. She also had a joke I didn’t quite have the archeological background to get that it was the Macedonians who built them because the timelines lined up. The wool connection is that they had found counterweight stones from looms still in situ. Apparently the looms took careful balance so once you were done weaving you could typically just cut the stones off so the order wouldn’t get mixed up and leave them there until the next time you took up weaving. Someone had cut these stones off and not picked the weaving back up, so they were still sitting there a millennia or so later.

From there we fast-forwarded only a couple of centuries to Laxdale Farm to see what this sheep thing was all about. Although we had seen some Shetland sheep the previous day this was our first up-close look at a more money-making farm system. It was a lot of fun. Upon our arrival we split into two groups, and our group first went off to look at the sheep. Our guide for this portion, the husband of the operation, showed us around the barn and told us lots about sheep breeding. I wrote that down in my journal but don’t recall much about how to breed sheep, having been too distracted by the sheep. We also learned about the grazing system, where each farm or croft would have associated rights to graze so many sheep up on the “hel,” or peatlands. And then finally he showed us how to skirt the wool once it was sheared and what he was looking for in a fleece. I found all these Shetlanders funny though hard to tell if they meant to be. One lady asked him how he felt about his wife going into the yarn business, and in response he gave us a look and said “well you support your wife.” Pretty funny, but doubly so when our group went inside and his wife told us the yarn was his idea in the first place. Triply funny when you consider that told us also that he doesn’t even know how the yarn was made, in a callback to my first paragraph there.

The next stop, as was typical in these tours, was inside for refreshments. They gave us coffee and some wonderful brownies, and then the wife Sheila told us all about her yarns. For anyone who wanted to walk away with some yarn (i.e. everyone on the tour), one of their rooms had been converted into a whole yarn shop. All the stuff produced and sold on the islands was indeed gorgeous, though interesting that there wasn’t really a place for small-batch processing on Shetland. You could sell your wool to Jamieson’s, who spins the wool and produces and dyes their own yarn, but if you’re an operation like Laxdale you have to ship the wool down to Scotland to have it spun and then it comes back up to Shetland.

And with that it was back on to Lerwick where we spent the afternoon wandering around. We had dinner reservations and a talk to go to. We checked out The Shetland Times Bookshop and wandered through Fort Charlotte. In the bookshop my super amazing wife bought some cookbooks, which is very on-brand. Eventually I realized I was feeling a bit queasy from only having eaten some brownies since breakfast and I got a sandwich as an appetizer for dinner, which was at The Dowry and great.

Then it was time for our talk, which was An Evening with the Doulls. The Doulls being of course that year’s Wool Week Patrons. When my super amazing wife talked about highlighting wool producers this is actually what she was talking about. The first part of the evening was a short documentary on the Doulls, which again I think was unintentionally very funny. Like there was a talking head moment in the documentary where the interviewee was saying “the Doulls have been raising Shetland sheep to the highest standard for generations” with an immediate smash cut to the Doull patriarch there with a pamphlet saying “here’s the standard” (referring to the standard book, which he helped write as an early member of the Shetland Sheep Society). As an insight into the wool trade, we also learned that all the Doulls need other jobs as well, despite owning something like four islands on which they graze sheep.

After the documentary they had a question-and-answer portion with the Doulls themselves. Seeing the stars of the show man, a Hollywood moment. It was a very charming portion of the evening because of how refreshing it was to see people with absolutely no media training. People were asking things like “how do you know it’s a good fleece” (the documentary talked extensively about how good the Doulls fleeces are, or at least the fleeces of their sheep anyway) and our patriarch there was like “well, uh… you know it when you see it.” Raw, uncut, beautiful. An inspiring part of this is that grandma, the matriarch, had a stroke a few years back and doesn’t have great use of her left arm anymore, but was still able to knit through the use of the traditional Shetland makkin’ belt. These were originally developed to let Shetland women knit while carrying giant baskets of peat, so as to maximize productivity, so very cool really they’re still useful. She was still very capable of making some of that gorgeous lace work (and fast!) we had seen in the museum. Though finally, with the Doulls worn out by their jampacked schedule of media appearances, and my super amazing wife and I worn out from a day full of wool production, it was time to turn in for the night.