Cable Telegraph

Today we went back to Ferryoons*, the real place where we used to live before we decided to downsize. We went to check out the building plot we kept when we sold the rest of the land. And we spent a wonderful couple of hours in our first bubble since January 2020, with a friend and former neighbour. There was cake! Cake is a Good Thing.

Diamond shaped signs like this used to be erected to indicate cables laid beneath the water where vessels passed, saying in other words, don't you dare hook this up or we'll be after you. This one used to carry all the telephone traffic between Caithness and Inverness, and only fell out of use when newer cables were laid aloing the A9.

It still served a few local properties until recently. Openreach managed to break it, a mile up the road, and we were all off for two weeks. In the interim, they agreed to direct landline calls to people's mobiles, but got all the numbers wrong. So we were all taking messages for one another and running down the road to pass them on. It cemented a lot of friendships, especially as one household was organising a wedding.

I think Martinski blipped a shot, a while back, of similar signs on the Caledonian Canal.

*Ferryoons is called Littleferry these days, after the Duke of Sutherland decided to anglicise it in the days when Big Families could do that sort of thing. Big estates in general are a Bad Thing.