My love of four meadows and fascination with those people in the past who scythed and stooked here has led me to seek a sense of our ancestors’ relationship with the trees, bushes and berries of Pudsham as well as to learn some useful knowledge about trees. Again I find help from the old books as November draws in. The rain beats at my window in my little house on Dartmoor but the lamp is lit.
‘I have news for you – the stag bells, winter snows, summer has gone. Wind is high and cold, the sun low, short in its course. Deep red the bracken, the wild geese have raised their accustomed cry’*
It is late Autumn on Dartmoor-almost winter – a scene set firmly in the moors and mountains, the forests dangerous with roaring elk, the wind fierce, as a black tide pours off the moor but a song is carrying over the brown heather like this.
‘Travelling moorland and travelling mossland long and wide/Safe and whole return from crooked passes, from pits /From the straight arrows of the slender banshee/ Keep them from straying’.**
A Late Bronze age farmer and a younger woman dressed in warm, woven, woollen tunics are turning their cattle from heather beds on the wild moor to fend them in the winter folds of Pudsham below Pil Tor. ***For the stock are let out to high summer pastures on the high moor and brought back in the winter closer to new settlements gradually establishing lower down. The herd come in off the moor. First long shanked horns emerge through the mist bands then the powerful shanks of fierce male black aurochs followed by the more manageable chestnut brown cows. It is a dangerous journey, they could easily tumble over precipices or into ravines between the enormous granite boulders where stunted birch and rowan trees only can thrive.
Birch
‘On land the trees and forests were considered as important as earth and water and considered food for the spirit.’****
It is November the month of the Birch. The start of the Celtic winter. For the Celtic year was divided into two halves, light and dark. Shelter of flock and food supply is urgent when wild wolves and bears are on the hunt. Certain starvation shadows the dark months should food supply over this long-extended period become haphazard. Either through lack of knowledge, negligence, wild beast, or inattention to the gods. Sacrifices have to be made. Rituals performed to mark this magical time of year, to conjure the aid of the ancestors in the Otherworld below our feet. A world just as real as the world of the everyday.
Birch is in gold leafage in Pudsham Meadows, the ‘musical tree’*. Goldfinch are gathering and singing in winter flocks in high branches, chink-a-chink, lee and lo! they go. Then they toss themselves in gold and scarlet synchrony of wing and crown, into the knapweed seed heads rocking in the wind-a foot above the entangled dead flora of the meadow. The white birch trunk rising out of the shrub and thorns gave the Celt hope and the priests and priestesses bark paper to scry with.
I hear the gate click behind me. The black tide flows into the meadow, lowing. Followed by the voices of women singing and chatting. A mother and daughter. The bark of the birch is silver white giving an appearance of female slenderness. Dressed in small and loosely hung leaves the trunk is scarcely hidden. Also known as Lady of the Woods, she is graceful and strong.
Duir/Oak
‘To the Celt it seems the oak was the tree held to be most sacred… mast years held strongest pagan significance.’ Della Hooke ***
Oaks are taking the brunt of the prevailing wind westwards from Corndon Down in Pudsham meadow now. Each leaf fights back. I struggle to a corner away from the wind to write. This year is a mast year, cobble-acorn pavements crunch beneath my boots. The women, their cows safely fended begin to gather these kernels of the oaks, their backs bent, their long tunics blowing and muddied at the hem. I bend and feel the fruits of the oak, smooth, fat and enamelled bronze beads in my hand. The smell of tannin reminds me of brandy Christmas cake and I’m with my dad gathering acorns after our on our winter feast in the woods. Sizzling wild mushrooms in the black pan in the fire pit, and the acorns tumbling onto us and making me laugh.
The wind now tears at the oaks on the edge of Sylvia’s field. I hold my hands up and acorns drop from their child teacups into the palms of my open hands. I stuff them into my raincoat pocket. The woman and girl place them in their crips – large leather sacks slung over their shoulder. They are preparing to bake a special cake for Samhain (Pron. Sahwain) one of four annual Celtic Fire Festivals. For on the 31st of October the spirits of the ancestors will rise out of the earth and strange beings wander freely among us. The feast is prepared, for the souls of the dead will be beckoned to attend.
And the sacred fire pit for the baking of the acorn flour cake can only be stoked with the sacred wood of Oak, Hazel and Rowan.
By Roz Brady
*Excerpt from a 9th century Irish poem in A Celtic Miscellany by Kenneth Jackson 1951
**Herding Song from Carmina Gadelica: Hymns, and Incantations by Alexander Carmichael 1900. An anthology of Gaelic oral tradition compiled in the late 19th century Carmina Gadelica is celebrated as a record of the vanishing Gaelic Celtic culture of the people of Western Scotland. The author may have embellished the material here and there but his collection of charms, hymns and invocations are widely accepted as having integrity. It is likely that all peoples of the Celtic cultures sang and chanted as indigenous peoples and folk singers still do today out whether in fields, forest, mountain or moor and that Carmichael’s anthology carries the seeds and fragments of the earlier Celtic culture’s oral tradition down the long stream of time.
***A word on the history of Pudsham Meadow. During the Bronze Age both sheep and cattle pastured glades and grassland on Dartmoor.These areas were kept open by their grazing habits as well as by large wild beasts such as elk and wild oxen. The glades or open grassy areas were gradually enclosed and eventually hedged and walled, firstly into small round or roughly rectangular fields then into larger more linear areas in later historic periods. ‘Most prehistoric fields were irregular’ writes world renowned ecologist Oliver Rackham in ‘Woodlands’, ‘If they still remained in use [in later periods] one cannot tell them apart from fields made by the Anglo-Saxons or Medievals. Most [meadows and fields] go back to a former period and were in use throughout the Bronze Age…and have been effaced by millenia of later fields.’
****from Anglo-Saxon Trees by Della Hooke 2019