Another LifeMichael Viney
Briars hang down from the boundary hedges of our acre like grapnel lines from a besieging army. I patrol with the loppers, clipping them off before they can touch their tips to earth, there to take root and arch on again next year.
"A widespread belief in Ireland," I read in a new book, "was that those who wished to invoke evil spirits could do so by crawling through such a briar arch on Halloween night while making their unholy request." In England, on the other hand, it was believed that "a child with whooping cough could be cured by passing it under the bramble arch three times before breakfast for nine days in succession." And in Wales, "children with rickets were made to creep or crawl under blackberry bushes three times a week."
Were such things really believed, by whom exactly, and is there still a point in rehearsing such folly? It's "folklore", of course, which says something about our social history, and also testimony - if of an often shaky sort - to the prevalence of myth and superstition. To Niall Mac Coitir, author of Irish Wild Plants: Myths, Legends and Folklore, it is part of a heritage now largely lost and - like the plants themselves - well worth conserving.
Mac Coitir, who wrote a similar book about Irish trees, grew up in a bilingual environment in Dublin enriched by "a love of Irish history, culture and nature". His new work gleans, in passing, the most complete harvest yet of Irish plant names in English and Irish.
It is a handsome hardback production (from the Collins Press for €25, with support from the Heritage Council) and illustrated by some vivid and often charming watercolours by Grania Langrishe. It sifts through a wide library of sources, among them the Oxford Dictionary of Plant Lore by the British folklorist Roy Vickery, who made great use of the 20 tons of archives in the department of Irish folklore at UCD.
I have great respect for folklore, both for what it says about human relationships with nature and as a prompt to the modern creative imagination. I once used UCD's help in making a television documentary called Death of the Fairies? (the question-mark was important). The project brought home the dramatic punctuation of Irish rural culture that arrived with television one frosty night in 1961, as if the little people in the box in the corner had suddenly taken over the provision of drama, intrigue and amusement.
Even today, I see final flashes of a rural culture that once abounded in inventiveness and eccentric supposition. The spiralling surrealisms improvised on the spot by neighbours bantering at a haymaking or silage meitheal showed a liveliness of mind that TV has largely anaesthetised.
This cultural gulf makes it hard to begin to imagine the context in which the beliefs assembled, plant by plant, in Niall Mac Coitir's book took shape, or how common any practical trust in them really was. Amulets against evil, love charms and religious appeasements have now lost all their resonance.
At this month's big science festival in Britain, a professor suggested that human brains are "hard-wired" to seek reasons for events and will settle for the supernatural in lieu of a better alternative: perhaps this is the kind of psychological perspective we expect from such books now.
As for herbal medicine, the second major thread in Irish Wild Plants, today's interest in alternative medicine should help to guarantee its welcome. But while it's interesting to know that St John's Wort, the herbalist's antidepressant, "was St Colmcille's favourite plant and is a great protector against evil and melancholia . . . ", there are few insights for modern phytotherapy or ethnobotany in such well-worn legends as those of Mad Sweeney or Fionn Mac Cumhaill.
The mere gathering of notions of what a plant was believed to be "good for" can have some bizarre results. Mugwort, Artemisia vulgaris or mongach meisce for example, is a nondescript wayside plant in the same family as wormwood and "known since ancient times for its ability to restore menstrual flow, ease delivery and cleanse the womb, which earned it its name as the mother of herbs". But it was "also said to protect the traveller against tiredness, sunstroke, wild animal and evil spirits", not to mention "lightning, plague and carbuncles", and "was still occasionally used in Ireland as a cure for epilepsy up until recent times".
References to sources notwithstanding, one can end up feeling, if not out of sorts, then not all that enlightened. But perhaps I am being too exacting in looking for science and analysis in what is primarily a celebration of a lost experience of nature and certainly a labour of love.
That alone earns its place on the shelf of Irish wildlife literature.
Eye on Nature
With reference to Eye on Nature, September 2nd, both oak bush and speckled bush crickets are widespread though local in Ireland. There are also three other species: dark bush cricket, Roesel's bush cricket and short-winged conehead. There are two theories: firstly, that they are the result of recent introductions and, secondly, that they are under-recorded, but localised due to the intensification of agriculture.
Tony Nagle, Minane Bridge, Co Cork
On August 25th a flock of more than 100 swallows filled the sky, roosting in a hawthorn bush and on power lines in the Glens of Antrim. By the 30th not a single swallow was to be seen.
M McKeever, Cushendall, Co Antrim
Swallows start leaving in August, but mainly in September. Your flock may have moved further south to join up with others.
I watched three pigeons for several minutes recently engage in what seemed to be synchronised courtship behaviour: facing each other, beaks no more than about two inches apart, bowing and circling.
Tom Murphy, Drogheda, Co Meath Perhaps juveniles practising.
EyeonNature