Village Country Diary


continued from previous page Spring


blackthorn


them ornamental. It was the wood traditionally used for Irish shille- laghs. The thorns are very sharp and can puncture tyres, so hedge trim- mers need to clear up carefully after themselves. Blackthorn doesn’t seem to attract so much mythology as its relative the whitethorn or hawthorn. It ap- pears a lot in medieval poetry and folksong, though, as a description of female beauty. Girls have skin as white as blackthorn blossom and eyes as black as sloes – including a


Sloe gin


famous one in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It also appears in weather folklore. The period when it flowers can often be a cold one, and if there is a cold snap in March or April it has been for hundreds of years referred to as a “blackthorn winter” – the counterpart of St Luke’s summer. Black, white and red are colours


found in many mythologies and religions. Blackthorn only has two of them, so it has the emblems of old age and death (black), and of youth and purity (white), but not the red symbols of maturity and passion.


Red admiral on ivy


It is linked to the Celtic spirit in her guise as Brigid, the bride or young woman of spring and of the Imbolc festival, and with her older embodi- ment as the crone who presides over the period of Samhain, the autumn festival which brings us close to the dead. Samhain, of course, lives on in


Christian times as Halloween/ All Saints’ Day at the end of October. Festivals of death, when autumn transitioned into winter, were not seen as sad affairs but as a way to connect with the people who had


46


The Village October 2018


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