Nucleus at Wick: fine architecture and fish girls

It's last May again, hence the sunny weather! This time, my visit to the building where they keep the Caithness county archives. 

Caithness is the northernmost part of mainland Scotland, partly a land of rolling green fields very suitable for grazing, partly a wilderness of peat bog and other kinds of wetland. It has only two towns of any size: Thurso and Wick. There are several smaller places, villages really, like Halkirk and Lybster, but the real action, such as it is, is at Thurso and Wick. They are both 'planned towns' with a grid layout in their older parts. Both are nowadays prime stopover places on the North Coast 500 tourist route. Thurso has major harbour facilities at nearby Scrabster, where the ferry for Orkney departs from. Wick also has major harbour facilities, but they are actually part of the town, not two miles distant, and indeed the harbour is central to its daily life - its very soul. Wick has, to my mind, the better architecture, and rather more character. But Thurso is sunnier, has a fine park, and has the beach that Wick lacks. 

Administratively Wick is the more important place, possessing for instance the law courts, and the general hospital. Both towns are served by rail, each with stations on the Far North Line out of Inverness, Wick's station being the terminus. Wick also has the airport. Neither town has much in the way of shops beyond the usual ones found anywhere, although Wick has a particularly good Tesco. Thurso's Tesco isn't a patch on it. 

If ever I came to live in Caithness, neither town would completely satisfy all my day-to-day needs, but taken together they do, and, having thought about it, I would probably plump for a nice bungalow in Halkirk, roughly midway between them. Halkirk has the air of a somewhat comfortable and select little suburb, and I suspect it was, and remains, a locality of choice for incoming engineering executives and managers. If ever I sold up in Sussex and decided to transplant myself there, I could afford (given Sussex house values) to buy almost any property on offer, and still have enough left over to fly south from Wick airport to whenever I wanted to. I don't think I will ever uproot myself from Sussex, but if requiring a bolthole, Caithness is certainly a possible destination, and possibly more practical than living on Orkney. On the other hand - being of Scandinavian heritage - I might prefer the Norse-orientated cultural life on Orkney to the Gaelic tradition in Caithness, although both share a Pictish history. This part of present-day Scotland was for centuries the hub of the northern seafaring world, with plenty of evidence of it still to be seen.

One thing I haven't mentioned so far is Dounreay, meaning the nuclear power station that was built on the coast there, and its transformative effect on Caithness as a whole, and Thurso in particular. Many of the newer buildings and facilities in Caithness were connected with Dounreay, and it spawned all kinds of supporting businesses, from hotels to a factory in Halkirk that made the disposable plastic suits worn by workers in the reactor. The needs of the power station led to better roads, the improved A9 for instance. Its construction, operation, and even its decommissioning meant well-paid jobs. Economically it was a Very Good Thing. My personal stance on nuclear power stations is that they are necessary, and given proper planning, construction and management the radiation risk can be controlled and need not be dangerous. 

I am in fact interested in these things, and wanted to learn more. One can no longer visit Dounreay and have a conducted tour, but the Nucleus building at Wick, adjacent to the airport, had the information I wanted. So on 16th May last year, I parked Sophie in the spacious car part for visitors, and approached the archive building. 

As ever, click on the pictures to see the detail.

It all looked quite new, and very modern in concept. Ahead of me was a linear construction, apparently a long tall fence. Where was the expected building? Was it underground?

As you walked closer, a series of pointy uprights gave you the gist of Caithness's modern history, decade by decade.

By now the true nature of the construction was clear. There was a proper building; it was enclosed by a long, high and very spectacular wall of steel slats, forming a sheltered triangular courtyard with a water feature. I thought that wall, and that courtyard, were stunning. It was very exciting architecture.

Wow. Fancy working here! Or coming to look up something. Or just to see whatever exhibition they were putting on. I imagined, for example, parties of noisy schoolchildren on a local outing being corralled in that enclosure. 

Let's go in.

This is not how most of Wick looks! The town consists of very solid tall stone buildings in the centre and south of the harbour, with mid-twentieth century accretions elsewhere. Not this sort of thing. 

I went in, and had a very friendly reception. They were delighted that somebody from faraway Sussex had come to visit, and took me very seriously. I had to fill in a form, put my bag and other things away in a locker - though I could retain my phone - and I was supplied with a Visitor badge to hang around my neck.

Then I followed the corridor that led to the archive study room. On the way I admired the use of glass and colour, and the views of another internal courtyard, a veritable suntrap on that day. The design had won a prestigious award.

Ah, the holy of holies. With every modern facility for research. I was given one of those desks. What did I wish to look at? The history and social impact of Dounreay nuclear power station, please. Well, they had two well-illustrated books considered to be the best introduction to that topic. I could take pictures of their contents to my heart's content. That seemed to be exactly what I wanted.

And so for the next hour or so I worked my way through these books, using my phone to copy pages of interest. What did I find? That may be the subject of an upcoming post. After finishing, I thanked the staff, collected my stuff from the locker, surrendered my Visitor badge, and drove away back to Dunnet Bay where my caravan was pitched. 

On the way out of Nucleus, I did have a quick look at their latest exhibition. It was about the Herring Girls, those Scottish girls and older women who, engaged together as a mobile 'crew', gutted caught fish on quaysides during the later nineteenth century and early twentieth century, mainly at Scottish ports, although they might seek work as far south as Great Yarmouth. It looked like a hard life at the best of times, and times were not always good. It was a livelihood that eventually vanished with the overfished herring.

Plenty of room for those noisy school parties!

Did they suffer from raw hands? Or lose fingers? Or smell of fish? (Questions little Lucy would have asked teacher) 

Gutting the herring, ready for salting and being put in those barrels. It was skilled work; a Herring Girl could slit and eviscerate a fish in seconds, and do it all day long.

The exhibition looked more closely at a few individuals and their lives. I didn't envy them.

The letters that were written to find work for the season each year, and the wages books kept.

There was a lot of information about the working lives of these girls, and what happened to their industry.

Conditions got worse. The girls rebelled.

It leaves you with the impression that not only the herring were exploited. Whatever you might say about contemporary workplace contracts and prospects, the girls had to put up with worse, even though it was a sociable way of life that many welcomed, and a way of escaping the drudgery and poverty of crofting. Although employment law was very thin, there were of course limits on how far a hiring company could go: Scottish and English notions of decency and respectability curbed the excesses that might occur in other parts of the world. In any case, these were feisty women who could stand up for themselves. Good for them, I say.