search.noResults

search.searching

dataCollection.invalidEmail
note.createNoteMessage

search.noResults

search.searching

orderForm.title

orderForm.productCode
orderForm.description
orderForm.quantity
orderForm.itemPrice
orderForm.price
orderForm.totalPrice
orderForm.deliveryDetails.billingAddress
orderForm.deliveryDetails.deliveryAddress
orderForm.noItems
f64 The Chime Child


The enigmatic Ruth Tongue was a Somerset folklorist, song collector, white witch… or maybe…Kitty Macfarlane looks into her life.


West Bagborough to the South and Triscombe to the North. Being high up can be an oddly grounding experience, and from here on a clear day you can see all across North Somerset to the Bristol Chan- nel, even beyond to the Brecon Beacons.


Y


In a village just down there, at the foot of these hills, was the beloved home of Ruth Tongue, folklorist and self- approved Somersetian, lecturer, song col- lector, Chime Child, ‘White Witch’… a leg- end of Somerset’s folk history. Her rela- tionship with this county was to become the most profound of her life. As she says in her book The Chime Child, it is “easy to lose oneself in the ancient silence of the hills – a silence that absorbed the whisper of wind over hill grasses, the hum of bees in the heather, the quiet calling of upland birds and the cold tinkle of little brown streams on their way seaward…”


If she had one foot in this bewitching landscape, then the other was firmly planted in some unseen supernatural world, populated by prowling ghosts, malicious sea spirits and puckish fairies. For Ruth Tongue believed herself to be a Chime Child – a mysterious morsel of West Somerset folklore – born between mid- night on a Friday and cock-crow on a Sat- urday and gifted with certain, rather uncommon abilities. A Chime Child, you see, had a rapport with the dead and fairies, immunity from ill-wishing, a special affinity with animals (many Chime Chil- dren become herdsmen or vets), and a knowledge of herbs and healing.


Jackie Oates sings The Posy Rhyme, collected by Ruth from a young woman in Taunton in 1906, on her 2013 Lullabies album. It holds to the old Somerset belief that spring has not truly arrived until you can put your foot on twelve daisies, just one example of the profusion of plantlore in Ruth’s stories. A gift of snowdrops ‘has- tens the coffin’ and ‘sews the shroud’, while lily of the valley is ‘too potent for unwary maids to wear’… by which we can probably imagine the worst: loose morals


ou join me up on the gorse- gilded zenith of the Quantock Hills, and I’m climbing to one of the highest points in Somerset, Wills Neck, which lies between


and itinerant young men! Narcissus and white lilac are unlucky to the unmarried. Hawthorne is a fairy flower; to pick or wear it means death.


Being a Chime Child also gives you great skill with music, rhyme and stories, and there is no doubt that Ruth was gifted in that regard. I head down from the hills to Halsway Manor, National Centre for Folk Arts, to speak to Mary ‘Biddy’ Rhodes, who is to be thanked for collating the manuscripts and artefacts held here into a very useful account of Miss Tongue’s life and works. We sit up in the woods above the 15th-century manor house on this increasingly dreary July day, on an over- grown tennis court, and Biddy tells me of her experience as a child in Ruth’s young entourage. As an older lady, Ruth would put on plays with the local children, teach them to ride, to plant allotments, and of course, to sing. I ask Biddy how Ruth came by so much material.


“What she did do, which was a mas- terstroke I think, was to lecture at


Morgan’s Pantry, St Audries


Women’s Institutes. She would talk about witches and fairies and lecture on aspects of folklore, and they would have these wonderful lavish teas after the main speaker, and everyone would come up and talk to her. And that’s the moment at which they told her scraps about their own memories and their own families, and what had happened in their own villages that had some bearing on what she’d been lecturing about. So she picked up an enor- mous amount of knowledge following on from her lectures and would then go home and write them all down.”


H


er vast collection of songs and stories spans the entirety of her life; she was collecting even as a young child, when she and her family took up


residence for some time in none other than Taunton Castle. Her time there made a profound impression on her; it was the site of phantasmal visitations and she would slip away from her nursemaid to brave the paved medieval halls, haunted by the Monmouth ghost – presumably an unhappy victim of the Bloody Assizes – and follow melodies through Taunton streets to their source. She would later attribute many of the songs she collected to local characters she met as a child, at the bustling Taunton Market held in the castle grounds on Saturday mornings. Peo- ple would say of her: “Miss Ruthie… that child will venture anywhere for a song!”


She was particularly struck by a school outing to St Audries Bay at West Quantox- head, where she remembers a cascading waterfall and otherworldly cave entrance, and so I jump in the car, leaving the parapets and gargoyles of Halsway behind, and head North along the A358 that flanks the Quan- tocks to the sea. A little while later I am standing on the rocky strata of St Audries Bay looking out over the Bristol Channel, Ruth’s ‘Severn Sea’. According to the leg- ends that enthralled her, the mermaids of this coast are called Sea Morgans, and they come to the shore at this particular spot, under this dramatic waterfall that tumbles to the rocks from the cliff above. With beau- tiful voices the morgans would lure men out onto the perilous mudflats, where mon- strous eels would feast off their bodies…


Photo: courtesy Halsway Manor


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148