Tag: mediaeval

Why is the Black Isle ‘black’?

Golden stubble, green oak, blue sky – Black Isle

This blog is prompted by a recent commercial post circulating on Facebook which gives one rather poor definition for the Black Isle’s ‘black’ nomenclature and then encourages folk to sign up for a tour with the company.

No thanks.

For those who have never visited my home turf, the Black Isle is not an island but a peninsula attached to the mainland Highlands by a narrow neck of land starting at the River Beauly and ending at the river Conon. To the north it is bounded by the Cromarty Firth, to the south the Beauly Firth and to the east the Moray Firth, opening into the North Sea. It is an area with a warmer microclimate than the mainland, resulting in fertile farmland with rich dark soil and pockets of ancient, lush and biodiverse woodland.

An-t-Eilean Dubh in Gaelic, there is some suggestion that Dubh, black, is just a corruption of Duthac. The Black Isle was on the popular Elgin to Tain pilgrimage route but St Duthac’s shrine was in Tain itself not at the Chanonry in Fortrose, so I find this one unconvincing.

Let’s explore some of the other reasoning (one added courtesy of Paul Johnson, thanks Paul!): 👇

The truth is no-one really knows why the Black Isle is called the Black Isle, but in this blog I will set out five explanations as told to me as a local at intervals over the past fifty or so years. They are geographical, supernatural, historical, social and natural, with some overlap between the five.

If you know of any others, please get in touch!

A contrasting foreground

The Black Isle in times past would not have been capped with today’s commercial coniferous pine forests, most of which are under 100 years old, and it was known as the Black Isle before that. The backbone, the Mulbuie, was, as the name suggests (buidhe means yellow in Gaelic), so at some point in the past it must have been a golden moorland ridge scattered with peat-moss heather and fragrant whin (gorse) bushes.

So why not the Golden Isle?

The answer is in the contrast with the startling bulk of Ben Wyvis behind and to the west of the Black Isle in winter. Travellers from the south who had slogged up the Slocht must have welcomed the sight of the dark bulk of the low-lying Black Isle (barely 1000′) across the water as they descended towards Inverness, contrasting with Ben Wyvis, our much higher (3000′ + Munro) and weather mountain. From the first frost in October to Easter and often later, ‘the Ben’ has a summit white with frost or snow. We look to Ben Wyvis to predict how the day will turn out weatherwise.

A traditional winter greeting hereabouts is ‘Snaw on the Ben’, usually said with doom-laden glee.

Or…

Black magic

The Scottish Reformation of 1560 swept away a now-forgotten Roman Catholic past. With it went carved wayside crosses like those you see on the continent and local religious tolerence of difference, of the old ways. A fearsome zeal for the new Protestant religion (which, ironically, had its roots in an English king’s lust as well as a desire to purge the Christian church of corruption) swept the Highlands like a brush fire. Standing stones were defaced and broken. Carved tombstones were reused as plainer slabs (see more on that at Kirkmichael).

Accusations of witchcraft became numerous in the 1600s, often aimed vindictively at decent, prosperous women as well as those vulnerable through deformity or madness. The outcome of any witch trial was generally a foregone conclusion, but not always.

Sir Thomas Urquhart, the eccentric genius laird of Cromarty, saved one young pair of Croms who had accused themselves of ‘consorting with demons’ – presumably in the grip of some kind of religious fervour whipped up by an enthusiastic witchfinder. Sir T had just returned from a grand tour of the continent and was having none of it. Rather than agree to ‘the cleansing fire’ he put the pair up overnight, got them merry and encouraged a couple of his servants to ‘dally’ with them. In the morning, sure enough, the accused claimed to have consorted with demons that very night. Sir T quickly saw these gullible souls married to their willing ‘demons’, the sacrament of marriage protecting them from further reprisals. Unsurprisingly the church hated Sir Thomas thereafter, and the feeling was mutual.

More about Sir Thomas Urquhart at Cromarty Courthouse!

Less fortunate was the Brahan Seer, one Coinneach ‘Odhar’ (Dun-headed Kenny) Mackenzie, a Lewis man with the second sight. He came unstuck by ‘seeing’ the husband of Isabella Countess Seaforth – the head of the politically powerful Mackenzie clan – up to no good in Paris, and unwisely sharing this insight with his wife publicly. Coinneach was accused of witchcraft and burned to death in a tar barrel (likely the ferry beacon for summoning the vessel from Ardersier) on the highest point of Chanonry Point, where a mediaeval cross base can still be seen today. Before his grim end he thoroughly and chillingly cursed the great House of Seaforth: he predicted the death of all male heirs before the last of the line himself died, and that this doomed chief would know this time had come when various other clan chiefs had a variety of gruesome disfigurements and disabilities.

Worst of all, Coinneach predicted that a ‘white-coiffed lassie from the East’ would then ‘kill her sister’. Sure enough, once all the male heirs had predeceased Francis Humberston Mackenzie, and he himself had died, his widowed daughter returned from India (and in India, white is the colour of mourning) to take up her inheritance. She was at the reins of a carriage one day when it overturned, killing her sister.

It is not uncommon still for local people to have strange presentiments, perhaps echoes of Coinneach Odhar’s ‘seeing’. It is particularly useful for avoiding Police speed traps.

From black magic to…

Black Raiders

It’s hard to shake off the image of Vikings as tall, blonde, handsome chaps with horned helmets, isn’t it (thank you, Uthred son of Uthred…) but this part of Scotland was colonised by dark haired Danes (because ‘there ain’t nuthin’ like a Daaaaane….’). Although the indigenous locals probably did not welcome these new arrivals with open arms, not all Viking settlement was about dark deeds, burning churches, rape and pillage and so forth. The canny seafarers whose ships once stole, terrifyingly, up the firth under cover of a sea-mist or haar (a fine Old Norse word) would eventually settle and embrace Christianity and intermarry and farm the land just like everyone else. Dingwall was the place of the Thing, the Viking parliament (believed to be under the monument car park near the old library building). And in the Black Isle we still have Udale bay, Old Norse for The Bay of the Yew Trees.

Black Islers who belive themselves to be true locals who do an Ancestry-type DNA test will often be surprised to find a high percentage of Scandinavian blood. Tsk. We were all incomers once!

Or…

Black smoke from many homes

We have forgotten what it is like to warm ourselves and cook solely with open fires. For centuries people in the Black Isle burned wood and ‘moss’ or peat – turf they cut and stacked to dry up on the common land along the Mulbuie Ridge or even from along the coast. Again, travellers from the south might have seen a pall of yellow-black smoke from hundreds of hearths hanging over the Black Isle, rising from the many coastal chimneys of Redcastle, North Kessock, Kilmuir, Munlochy, Avoch, Fortrose, Rosemarkie and Cromarty.

People disposed of rubbish the same way too. Stubblefields were burned off after harvest to nourish the ground for the next crop. I have a happy memory of being allowed to play in a burning stubblefield, jumping through the quick-burning fires of waste straw in the early 1970s!

Higher up among the heather, too, a paler, more mysterious smoke would once have drifted upwards, juniper wood burned to fuel dozens of illicit whisky stills. Winters in the past were longer and harsher than they are now, and a dram of uisge-beatha helped them pass more easily. One Statistical Account relates that there were more whisky stills in the Black Isle than anywhere else in the Highlands.

The first legal distillery was licensed to the Forbes clan in Ferintosh.

Or…

Ancient Woodland

My friend Paul Johnson points out that there are still legacy Caledonian-type Granny Pines all over the Black Isle, from Mount Eagle on top all the way down to sea-level. Many are hidden either singly or in small groups in the current forestry plantations (and Gallowhill, Blackhills and also on the Rosehaugh estate to name just a few) and also in more deciduous woods such as the Beechwood at Raddery and the natural Birchwoods at Gallowhill – even in the Oakwoods at Drummonreach and Tore.

Many of the plantations and other woods are included on the Ancient Woodland Inventory for Scotland, almost all in fact. The Black Isle was once (maybe still is) home to Capercaillie and still has many of the usual pinewood residents, from Pine Martens to Crossbills. We still have the Bog Woodland Monadh Mor which is not considered part of the Caledonian Pinewood Fragments inventory for some stupid bureaucratic reason, but it should be!

Mature pines are dark green that look black from a distance. Most of the Black Isle may well have been part of the Great Wood, but it was systematically felled for timber and to clear land for farming and housing over the last 1500 years or so. Perhaps there was always a moorland ‘top’ above the trees, covered in moorland and whin, hence the ‘Mulbuie’ ridge – looking a bit like a monk’s tonsure.

From a distance, a mass of ancient woodland would look black…

So…

.. landscape, witchcraft, Vikings, whisky or ancient pines could all explain why our Isle is known as Black today.

Which do you reckon? Or is it something else?

Feathery feasting for Twelve Days?

The earliest published version of The Twelve Days of Christmas dating from the late 1700s

A confession. I have never particularly liked The Twelve Days of Christmas. I prefer my carols bleakly midwinterish. Angels, a star, a manger, the baby, shepherds and three wise men: or failing those a bit of brightly berried pagan greenery. It did not help that at our local church we used to have to get up and sing the fatuous Twelve Days of Nonsense accompanied by witty gestures: extrovert heaven and introvert hell.

These Twelve Days of the Christian calendar begin on Christmas Day, December 25th and end on Twelfth Night, January 5th: the time of year when darkness and light struggle for symbolic and often literal supremacy. January 29th is the fifth day after Christmas – which in the carol offers that most nonsensical gift of all, five gold rings. I suppose the recipient could always melt them down, but really? And why the dramatic pause in the carol on this line in particular? That has always puzzled me – but recently I have stumbled on a solution.

I read somewhere a year or so ago that the carol might really be a celebration of birdlife. The RSPB has since had a good stab at which the ‘other’ birds might be here 👇 https://www.rspb.org.uk/our-work/rspb-news/rspb-news-stories/the-12-birds-of-christmas/

While all very interesting to birdlovers, this still does not explain why an ancient carol first sung long before binoculars were invented should have been written purely out of ornithological enthusiasm. It just seems to be a bit unlikely.

The Twelve Days was first published in the late 1700s but must have been sung for far longer. It is an example of a mediaeval cumulative song or rhyme (another is The House that Jack Built, inspiring more recent versions such as A. A. Milne’s The Royal Slice of Bread and Angelo Branduardi’s A la Foire de l’Est). In this early period of human history, people did not so much admire birds as eat them. Artists painted dead birds as gory still life. And dead game birds were frequent gifts, especially when times were hard. I still enjoy an occasional brace of pheasant.

The Twelve Days was a time of conviviality and feasting, supposedly after fasting (fasting is still a serious part of many world religions but it plays little part in modern western Christianity, as our UK obesity levels demonstrate. Ash Wednesday and Good Friday were once strictly kept fast days, and Lent meant giving up rather more than chocolate or booze. In theory a 40-day Christmas fast should begin on 15th November).

Mediaeval winters were harsh and birds were eaten rather than meat or fish as ponds and rivers froze, seas were rough and as it was difficult to hunt larger animals in snow. Birds fly slower in the cold and are easier to catch.

Supposing The Twelve Days is not so much a carol as a menu?

In this light, let’s see if we can make more sense of the non-bird elements to the carol:

In a pear-tree sounds very like est un perdrix – you don’t pronounce the x in French. So the first line means ‘a partridge in English is un perdrix in French’. French chefs cooking for English tables are no modern phenomenon. Was the carol-writer lampooning a French chef with a feeble grasp of English and, perhaps, rather an ardent reputation for buying favours with food?

Two turtle doves (delicious, so hunted almost to extinction) and three French (sic) hens would have certainly enhanced any feast.

Four calling birds: well, all birds call, don’t they – but colley-birds are blackbirds (the Latin for the whole thrush family is Turdus, so let’s all just be thankful that we don’t now sing about ‘four bonny turds’ or suchlike). Colley-birds were popular pie ingredients.

Five gold rings too are birds – I have heard goldrings identified as yellowhammers and goldfinches and even ring-necked pheasants: I think though that the grand melody pause in the middle of the carol is a musical joke, and so a goldring may in fact be a goldcrest, the tiniest British bird of all, which nests in little fluffy balls woven from lichen, wool and moss, hanging from the topmost branches of conifers.

Six geese and seven swans – obviously enough to satisfy any hungry family. But eight maids a-milking? The RSPB suggests a tenuous link with the nightjar, a rare, shy bird said to steal milk from cattle while in fact catching of insects attracted by the bright light inside. I cannot find any records of eating a nightjar anywhere.

Far more likely for the ‘eight maids a-milking’ are squabs, young fat wood pigeons fed milk by their mothers, the only birds to lactate (the milky substance is then regurgitated). Squab pie was a hugely-rated mediaeval treat and pigeons – gentle, mild mothers – have an association with the Virgin ‘maid’ Mary.

Early versions of the song change the position of the final four verses. In the social order then the lords would have been at the top, then the ladies, then the pipers and the less-skilled drummers.

The nine drummers would surely be green woodpeckers (or the lovelier old name, yaffle), ten pipers could be sandpipers or curlew which both have piping calls – all birds eaten by the desperate. For eleven ladies dancing why not great-crested grebe, mirroring each others’ movements on the water in a love dance. Water-birds like grebe were reckoned to be the equivalent of fish so could be eaten on Fridays and other fast-days.

As for the twelve lords-a-leaping, this could be any member of the grouse family jumping about in the rowdy heat of the lek, driving off competition to attract the best mate. In my new version (below) I have chosen the king of them all, the huge, rare and shy capercaillie (nb rhymes with cap not cape). Yes, even the poor now-endangered caper could be eaten, although it required burying for several weeks and tasted strongly of pine needles even then. Bleurgh.

All this set me pondering the ghastly culinary process of ‘engastration’, an echo of which persists in our stuffing of turkeys with sausagemeat, chestnuts or herbs. Engastration means placing a boned bird one within the other, the outer layer being absolutely enormous (think a bustard, engastrated almost to extinction, or a mute swan) and each inner bird reducing in size like a Russian doll. The French (naturellement) refined this into le rôti sans pareil – the matchless roast – where no less than twenty birds were stuffed one inside the other, and the smallest bird – perhaps a poor goldcrest – being finished off with an olive stuffed with a single caper (everyone now vegetarian? Grand…). This monster could take a day to roast and how food poisoning was averted is a mystery: perhaps each layer was part-roasted before enveloping it with the next?

I am now convinced that The Twelve Days of Christmas is simply a send-up of a vast and varied flock of edible birds as a novelty showpiece at a noble banquet, or series of great midwinter feasts (so bon appétit to all… 🤢).

If this is the case, should we instead be singing The Twelve Days of Feathers – perhaps something that goes like this:

On the twelfth day of Christmas my twitcher sent to me:

Twelve capers-caillie (now lekking daily)

Eleven water-dancing grebe (posing, prancing)

Ten pipers sandy (little legs so bandy)

Nine yaffles drumming (set the forest thrumming)

Eight squabs all milky (fed by pigeons silky)

Seven swans a-swimming (nest by rivers brimming)

Six geese a-laying (pond to stop them straying)

In high moss-ball nests do swing; one-two-three, four, five goldring!

Four colley-birdus (in Latin – Turdus!)

Three French hens (laying eggs in pens)

Two turtle doves (cooing of their loves)

And a partridge (c’est un perdix – English from French translated, you see).

Have a very happy and healthy 2023 everyone, and if you have enjoyed this blog please comment, follow and share 😊.