What are they?

[A Duke]

I thought you were going too say handles for a doodle sack.

[Colin62]

They are chanter covers. A chanter is the part of a set of bag pipes that the fingers operate on to produce that beautiful sound. The chanter contains a reed that dries out. The covers protect the reed in the chanter.

You don't think the bag pipes produce very nice music??? . Now there is a line to play with???

Jim

They're called dry-stocks. The stock is the bit that gets tied into the bag, and the pipes slot into them. To protect the reed from the high humidity in the bag, people started using an extra stock to put the chanter into, which is where the name comes from. Of course the reed would then dry out, so they started using blocked off dry-stocks to keep the moisture in the reed fairly constant.

I've been playing the bagpipes since 1976. We didn't bother with dry-stocks much in those days, probably because the old leather bags breathed better than the synthetic ones we use nowadays.

[Christos]

Interesting.

[Tim Creeper]

Well there you go. I thought they were thimbles for a masochist.