Water, wood and stone: the inspirational fabric of the land

Tonight sees the final session in Finding Inspiration Through Folklore, a series of community workshops supported by Creative Scotland. We will be holding a sixth and final evening with story-sharing, music and song next month. More details to follow!

ELLIE ROOK CUPCAKES!

Things have been so busy recently, with the upcoming launch of my third novel The Unmaking of Ellie Rook (Polygon) that there hasn’t been time to update the blog on a weekly basis.

However, let’s take a look at what we’ve been doing over the last few weeks.

 

 

 

In Week Two we looked to the woods for inspiration and shared some stories inspired by trees and forests. Remember that old recording of  ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic?’ The song has been referenced in dozens of films and TV productions- often very unlikely ones such as Fear and Loathing in LA, Peaky Blinders and various psychological horror films. This is a prime example of society making its own mythology, placing an innocent children’s rhyme within an inappropriate or dangerous setting.

This gives us the distinct feeling that something is ‘off’- it is disorientating and ‘uncanny.’

 

The uncanny is the psychological experience of something as strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious. Although Sigmund Freud wasn’t the first expert to discuss this phenomenon, he did attempt explain it in terms of the ‘home.’ He claimed that the word comes from the German Heimlich, or ‘homely’, so ‘Un-Heimlich’ means the act of meeting something unexpected on familiar territory, either physically or mentally.

This tree at Cramond, Edinburgh, looks like it’s waiting to trap the unwary…

No discussion of the forest could be complete without reference to my own favourite story, The Erl-King by Angela Carter. Carter certainly viewed fairy tales as a way of exploring ideas of how things might be different. “My intention was not to do ‘versions’” she wrote, “or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, ‘adult’ fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories.”

For me, this is what is so inspirational about folk tales. They grow in scope and importance with each telling; every generation finds a new relevance and as creatives we have a chance to ‘make it new’.

In Week Three we looked at ‘what lies beneath’ and acclaimed local storyteller and musician Ken Johnston came along to share his take on the world of water, from selkies and kelpies, to the shipyards and fisher lore. Such an interesting evening!

Week Four was all about the fabric of these islands. Are you a beachcomber of a rock-climber?  Most folk will admit to having a little obsession with stone in one form or another.

Hagstones or Witchstones, thought to offer protection against magic, sorcery and the undead

‘Certain natural rocks and boulders, appealing to the untutored imagination, were believed to be living objects with power to help or hurt mankind.’

~ J.M.McPherson, Primitive Beliefs in the Northeast of Scotland

Our ancestors took the stone obsession to a whole new level. In the Middle Ages ‘stone worship’ was condemned by the Church and among the acts of heathenism banned by King Edgar in the tenth century. It had little effect. It’s easy to see how certain stones of quirky appearance became the subject of superstition and folk belief.

Clach-na-Charra nr Ballachulish. Holed stones were particularly magical

This week, we’ll be looking at the characters to be found in folklore. From witches to trolls and everything in between- they all have a story to tell…

The Kelpie, by Thomas Millie Dow (1848-1919)

 

 

 

 

Ghost Mill

In my previous post, I was discussing the sort of energetic footprint we leave behind, when we live/work/visit a specific setting. Animals slip so quietly through the world, betrayed only by the faintest of markers: scent, sound, tracks in the earth and so on. Happily for writers, humans are not so subtle!

As adults, our perception of place is invariably skewed by experience, memory and expectation. A setting cannot exist in isolation from its human inhabitants.

We are noisy, clumsy, territorial and aggressive and it’s easy to imagine a residual trail of such behavioural memories staining the fabric of a place. Or perhaps buildings, in the true Gothic sense, mirror our own thoughts, feelings and fears, reflecting them back at us, rather than recording them.

However we choose to interpret the dynamic between setting and character, the relationship is integral to any complex psychological drama.

I find poetry helps me to understand my own impressions of place. There’s something about the immediacy of  the form that allows me to distil my own feelings into the right words. In attempting to convey a sense of continuation, and the overlapping of layers of time, I came up with the following poem:

                                                                       Ghost Mill

The wheel turns.

 

Dust falls from every wormhole;

every sandstone pore. Spores slacken

with the thump and thrum;

the din of timber.

The mill exhales, expands,

loosening old lives

like buttons on a waistcoat.

 

The wheel turns.

 

Shapes shift in the dark;

sparks blue as eyes;

the scent of old smoke.

The re-formed flour ghosts

of old men settle

beneath the faint silver of

their names.

 

The wheel turns.

 

The damsel in the machinery,

skirt dappled with

pawprints, slack-jaws gossip

down through generations;

until the past

meshes with the present.

 

On and on.

 

And still…

 

the wheel turns.

 

Sandra L. Ireland, 2015

 

 

 

Apple Lore

Close readers of this blog (there must be one or two) will have noticed that I’ve missed a week. But what a week that was! First we had Bloody Scotland, where I enjoyed my three minutes in the ‘Spotlight’, and then it was the launch of my debut novel Beneath the Skin. Pop over to my own blog for my thoughts on that!

But back to apples….As I recall, we’ve been looking at the dark and murky world of the Brothers Grimm, the Girl with No Hands, the mill and the apple tree. Apples have been featuring quite a lot in my life recently. At Barry Mill we held our first Apple Day, and our visitors were keen to pick some of our heritage apple varieties.

There’s something quite special about wandering through an orchard, and this week I met with Aberdeen-based poet and tree expert Petra Vergunst. Petra met me at the Mill, and we spent a happy hour wandering through the grounds and talking trees. She is currently undertaking a ‘magical’ tree project which no doubt we will return to in this blog, but for now, let’s talk apple trees…

King Arthur’s mystical Otherworld, Avalon, was known as Avallach, the Isle of Apples. It was there that the Fairy Queen, Morgan le Fay, resided. She held the power of life and death. The Celts believed that the power of healing, of eternal youth and of rebirth were all contained within the apple, and the tree itself (Quert) formed part of the Ogham tree alphabet. The apple tree often plays host to mistletoe, a plant sacred to the Druids, and according to the Irish Druid tradition, silver apples, cut from the bough of a magical apple tree, could lull listeners into a trance with their own peculiar music.

Apples, with their link to the afterlife, play a big part in the customs and rituals associated with Halloween, or Sambhain. Cutting the fruit in half reveals a pentagram, the symbol of magic and witchcraft. In many rural areas, it was customary to leave the last of the apple crop on the trees for the spirits to eat.

For more on the apple in mythology and folklore, click here.

Even Grimmer reading…

Last week’s rather Grimm tale; The Girl With No Hands, provoked quite a bit of interest, so I set myself the task of finding a more local version. Surely there must be a Scottish rendering of the story, complete with mill and apple tree? If you thought last week’s offering was dark and blood-thirsty, read on!

My research took me back many centuries. The earliest literary version of The Maid Without Hands can be found in the Vita Offae Primi, which was composed at the end of the twelfth century. The setting for this story is the ancient Kingdom of Northumbria, and the miller’s daughter becomes the daughter of the King of York. Fleeing her father’s lustful intentions, the girl is rescued by Offa, a legendary King of the Angles. In the tradition of all good fairy tales, the couple settle down and have children. Some years later, Offa is called upon to fight alongside the King of York and together they celebrate a great victory. Offa’s message to his wife (presumably, stick the kettle on, I’m on my way home ) is sabotaged by the evil father, and Offa’s men, back at base, receive instead an order to march the family into the forest and cut off their hands and feet. The mother and children are saved in the nick of time by an elderly hermit, and are reunited with Offa. I’m sure they lived happily ever after…

Interestingly, the Girl with No Hands narrative is a favourite among the storytellers of the travelling community, where it seems to have been adopted from the Gaelic tradition. No mills here, but an apple does feature in the tale. This version, ‘Daughter Doris‘ ( be warned-it’s particularly dark) was collected by the  School of Scottish Studies in 1955. A wandering piper called Davie Stewart was busking outside The Blue Blanket pub in Edinburgh’s Canongate, when he was invited to share some of his stories with the School.

In the absence of a mill in the above tales, I’ll finish with a story about an apple. At Barry Mill, we have a heritage orchard featuring many indigenous Scots varieties, including  ‘Bloody Ploughman’, which  has a very interesting tale behind its name. Legend has it that, in the late nineteenth century, a ploughman was caught stealing apples from the estate where he worked (Megginch  is often mentioned) and was shot dead by the gamekeeper. His grieving wife was given the bag of apples but discarded them on the ‘midden’, where a solitary seedling emerged. The seedling was rescued and named in memory of – The Bloody Ploughman. 

The fruit of this beautiful old variety is a brilliant deep blood red. When fully ripe the inner flesh becomes stained with pink.

So an apple with a legend all of its own. Next week, given the season, I’ll take a closer look at the mythology of the apple…

 

Grimm Reading…

I recently came across an intriguing and rather dark tale, thanks to writer and blogger Dawn Geddes.

“You’ll love it,” she promised. “It has a mill and an apple tree in it!”

Since the mill is currently surrounded by apples of every variety, what better season to share with you this Grimm (and very grim) fairy tale, ‘The Girl with No Hands’ (Grimm, 1857).

In the story, a poor miller is offered riches by the devil in exchange for ‘what lies behind the apple tree’. Presuming the devil wants to get his hands on the mill, the miller accepts and everything within his house transforms into gold. His wife, upon returning from the market, flies into a rage. Their only daughter has been sweeping under the apple tree all afternoon. When the devil shows up again to claim his due, the girl washes herself and draws a chalk circle on the ground so that she cannot be taken. Frustrated, the devil demands that the father keep all water away from her, because the water is more powerful than he. The girl then uses her tears as a charm to ward him off. Outwitted, the devil demands that the father chop off his own daughter’s hands….

There are many versions of this tale, and you can read some of them here: ‘The Girl Without Hands’.

The poet W. H. Auden famously declared that fairy tales are ‘among the few indispensable, common-property books upon which Western culture can be founded . . . it is hardly too much to say that these tales rank next to the Bible in importance’.

According to Melissa Ashley, of the University of Queensland, this particular story is both ‘important and resilient’. Records show that ‘The Maiden without Hands’ narrative is rated as having one of the highest levels of cross-cultural circulation. Traditional variants number into the thousands and have been recorded throughout Europe: Italy, the British Isles, France, Spain, Romania, Ireland and Germany, each country sporting several dozen examples. The story circulates in Russia, India, Canada, Mauritius, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Scotland, Iraq, Iceland, Armenia, Nigeria, and Japan. An Indigenous Australian version exists, and contemporary variants have been collected in the US, South America, and Africa.

I would be very interested to find out more about the Scottish version of this tale, and how it fits within the native landscape. The enchanted nature of water is something which recurs frequently in mill-related folklore and poetry, and apple trees, of course, have their own mythic heritage.

For some moody and atmospheric images of the landscapes which inspired the Brothers Grimm, have a look at the website of Kilian Schönberger.

I’ll leave you with a picture from closer to home; a mill and an apple tree…