Midsummer

While the national news is complaining that we (by which they generally mean England) haven't had much of a summer, it's been beautifully sunny in this little corner of Scotland. It's certainly a nice change from the past few years when summer consisted of a nice week in April before getting stuck in an interminable age of grey...

Today heralds the start of the summer holidays for the kids, and so yesterday I took a trip down to the beach while I still had time to myself to enjoy a little peace and quiet and pay the rent to Manannán. I took the dogs with me (my older dog, Eddie, is pretty much broken today, but he seems to think it was worth it) and they both had a good swim and a run around before I did my thing. A lot of fruits and trees are late this – we haven't had any strawberries ripen yet, the raspberries are being slow and the blueberry bush is still flowering so I'm not sure if I'll really get any this year, I think by the time they want to ripen the cold might kill them. But down at the beach the summer flowers were all out in force, especially yellow flag, for the benefit of Himself I'm sure:

And so I followed the trail of them down over the rocks to a sheltered wee cove that offers a bit of privacy. I'd brought some rushes from the garden, along with some food offerings and a pine cone (Rosie's contribution), and after having to rescue Eddie twice because he kept on face-planting himself into the cove from the surrounding rocks and then whimpering because he couldn't get up again and ZOMG he was stuck, I did my thing and set the offerings down.

The past few years I've tended to bring things home with me but this year I wasn't intending to. In recent months I've had the feeling I should lay off and even brought a few things back to the beach because they weren't sitting right with me for some reason. But yesterday it felt different and when I stumbled across a hag stone I immediately felt it was right to pick it up. It's not for me, anyway.

I spent some time wandering about and taking things in and discovered an embarrassment of bees. Bees! Bees, everywhere. I was speaking to a beekeeper a few weeks ago and he keeps eight hives in the area but said he lost half of his bees thanks to the hard winter, along with the pesticides and parasites that are killing them off. The EU have recently banned the pesticides in question (though typically the UK voted against it), but it will be a while before that has much of an impact. So bees are good:

Especially bees that are conveniently posing on a plant I photo'd last year and couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was. Thanks to the As Manx as the Hills page reposting a Wildflowers of the Isle of Man post on Facebook, though, I've discovered it's Bird's-foot trefoil (yay!).

On the way home I discovered that the foxgloves are out in bloom (also with convenient bee):

Also known as lus-nam-ban-sìth "the fairy women's plant" in Gàidhlig, or else meuran nan caillich mharbha, "dead women's thimbles," and is supposed to be good for breaking fairy spells. The more you know.

And now...I have six weeks of summer delights. Yay me...

Archive: Highland Heritage - Barbara Fairweather

Highland Heritage
Barbara Fairweather

This is not so much a book in its own right as a collection of booklets that were produced by the Glencoe and North Lorn Folk Museum in the 1970s, many of which are available to buy on their own. If you can find a copy of Highland Heritage going cheap then it's probably a good idea to invest in this, rather than buy them individually, but it seems Highland Heritage is hard to come by and I lucked out.

Subjects covered include the social calendar and customs, plantlore, farming, livestock, the Ballachulish slate quarry, the folklore of Glencoe, and a brief history of the area, along with selected excerpts from a wide variety of sources on Highland life and travels. Some chapters are more interesting than others, and more relevant to a CR context than others - these are:

The folklore of Glencoe and North Lorn
The Highland calendar and social life
Highland livestock and its uses
Highland wildlife
Highland plant lore

Which are both the chapter titles and the titles of the booklets if you want to look them up separately.

Of these, the chapters on folklore and the calendar don't offer anything you won't find anywhere else, but they do give a good idea of the lore that's specific to the area (which is often presented in a more general way in other books) so it's good if you want to concentrate on that because of ancestral heritage or something. The chapters on wildlife and plant lore offer a good overview of the subjects, and not being particularly au fait with herbalism, there was a lot that I hadn't seen before and was genuinely interesting to me. I can't say they offer anything very different from other books on plant lore, really, but it was different to me, at any rate.

The chapters towards the end of the book are almost entirely made up of excerpts which are mostly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but some are even older. On the plus side, there are some obscure and useful sources used - the sort of anecdotal evidence that help to lend some support to some of those folklore books written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that aren't so well referenced. I found a few references to bannocks that I thought were interesting, for one thing. For the student of Scottish history - particularly interested in everyday, domestic life - these chapters make a great resource. But to be fair, I couldn't say they make for the most thrilling of reads...

On the whole though, since each chapter was originally written as a booklet, they're all very general and lacking in any real depth, and as a book it feels a bit piecemeal and not very coherent. This makes it the sort of book you can pick through, rather than go through in one sitting - it's more suited to mine little tidbits from, when you want to get into the details details details, not so much when you want to look at the bigger picture. It's unfortunate, in that respect, that there's no indexing to help find those little gems more easily. Have some post-its or a pen and paper handy.

Taken on their own, as booklets, the more relevant chapters offer a good introduction to the subjects they cover (but not in a very analytical way, to be fair - it's all about the facts, not how to interpret those facts). In that sense they might appeal to a beginner lookng for a quick and easy read, but to be fair you're better off working through McNeill's The Silver Bough or Black's The Gaelic Otherworld in the long run. As a collection in Highland Heritage, though, it's probably going to appeal more to someone who wants to get beyond the usual suspects that tend to be high on the reading list. I wouldn't say it's a must have, but it's a good compliment.