The Witch by Moor and Wood and Shore : 無料・フリー素材/写真
The Witch by Moor and Wood and Shore / Giles Watson's poetry and prose
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| 説明 | troybooks.co.uk/a-witch's-natural-history.htmlCHAPTER 12:THE WITCH BY MOOR AND WOOD AND SHOREThe “secret, black and midnight hags” are waiting. He alights from his horse, his heel squelching into boggy ground. Behind him, a mosaic of moss and peaty pools stretches away to the horizon, buffeted by wind. There is not a tree in sight; the acid soil and exposure forbid the growth of anything above knee-height. Beside the pool at his feet, the moss draws water, a thirsty sponge plastered over the stone, inches thick, the air above it slick with moisture. Further out into the water, flowers hang above the surface like heads of nodding puppets, the stems blushing as if freshly bruised. Beneath the water, the plant bears little bladders, like shed reptiles’ scales adhering to the leaves. Crustaceans swim between the submerged stems, and the bladders gape like mouths, toothed with bristles. One touch of a branched antenna, and the valve trap springs and expands. Sucked inside, the crustacean struggles in vain as the sealed door slams, its prison walls exuding the juice of death. It may share its death-cell with an assortment of other partially digested insects and crustaceans, some of them still alive and threshing their appendages ever more slowly. The man knows nothing of these struggles between microscopic titans; he turns up the hill towards drier ground, where the first clumps of heather struggle to retain a foothold. His eyes are set on a triple cairn at the top of the hill, so he does not notice the plant underfoot, with its pale, curling leaves, sticky with their own exudations. Midges convulse in their death throes, their wings hopelessly glued to the surface of the leaves. There are other diminutive plants here too, with spatulate leaves bristling with appendages, all oozing a substance as sticky and seductive as toffee. A fly struggles on one of them, adhering haphazardly by one of its bulging compound eyes, doomed to buzz itself into its own minor oblivion. As it does so, the other tentacles on the leaf bend inwards to further ensnare the victim. The man pays them no heed, for he is heading up to the higher, drier heath, his mind reeling with the import of his meeting with the minions of Hecate. A wildcat yowls and bares its teeth at him, arching its back and twitching its grey bushy tail, before disappearing amongst the ling; no domestic cat – perhaps it is Graymalkin. He is Macbeth, King of Scotland, bent on his own struggle for survival, anticipating his assignation with three witches, who have already divined that they will meet him on this “blasted heath”.Had Macbeth not been so oblivious to these struggles on a smaller scale, he might have knelt, and learnt much from the wortlore of bogland plants. The spasmodic death throes of their insect victims might have led him more quickly to his nihilistic conclusion that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The crustacean-devouring water plant was Bladderwort (Utricularia), and its terrestrial cousin with the scroll-like leaves was Butterwort (Pinguicula), so named because the digestive juices exuded by the leaves are a sort of herbal rennet. Indeed, the leaves may be added to cream in order to form butter, provided, of course, one picks the dying flies off them first. Beside this was the Sundew (Drosera), perhaps the most easily recognisable of the bogland carnivorous plants. Moorland folklore insists that the Sundew and Butterwort, together with the liliaceous, yellow flowered Bog Asphodel, are injurious to sheep and cattle, causing weakness in the bones. Although the latter is indeed poisonous to cattle, it is probably the moorland environment itself which causes the problem, since the soil, and everything that grows upon it, is calcium deficient. Paradoxically, it is also said on Colonsay that cows that have eaten Butterwort are safe from supernatural maladies and elvish arrows, and they have at times been used in conjunction with whin and juniper as a charm against maleficient witchcraft. On the Isle of Man, Sundew is traditionally used as a love-charm by hiding the sticky rosettes in the clothing of one’s intended lover, but the token might just as easily be used as a signal for a clandestine assignation. Another plant of the upland bogs, the Bog Myrtle is used as an insect-repellant, emetic and vermifuge, and in the 1860s it will figure as the main ingredient of a regenerative beer made by the landlady of the ‘Black Horse’ in Ampleforth, Yorkshire. The glands in its leaves secrete a wax which can be made into fragrant candles.Macbeth will not pause on his way up the hill to chew on the stalk of the Heath Rush, for he is reliably informed that it causes hare-lips. Nor will he stoop to rip up the “tormenting root” of Tormentil, which jilted lovers burn at midnight on Friday to compel their lovers to return. He is soon knee-deep in heather, whose pink or purple flowers are said to be stained with Pictish blood shed in battle. It has long been used for tanning leather, it makes a refreshing dry ale, and its bell-shaped flowers are tempting to bees. Robert Graves makes an obscure and tantalising reference to an Irish tale of the goddess Garbh Ogh, collected by Dean Swift at Lough Crew. She haunted the heather moors, riding in a cart drawn by elks, accompanied by ten giant hounds, all with birds’ names, and she subsisted on venison milk and eagles’ breasts. Perhaps she was a winter goddess, for with the flowering of the heather, she built herself a triple cairn of stones and settled amongst the blooms to die, like a spent queen bee. Other parts of the moor may be covered with Bilberries, also known as Blueberries or Whortleberries, a delicacy picked in Ireland in anticipation of the feast of Lughnasadh.The calcium deficiency in these acid soils limits the range of fauna Macbeth is likely to encounter. A stag may cross his path, the whites of his eyes visible as he hurls himself away from the likely hunter. A hen harrier may wheel overhead. There are other moorland birds too: the “treacherous” lapwing, as Chaucer called her, roused from her nest into flop-winged flight. She lets out a succession of pies and weeps the further she flies, the wan sky catching her silhouette. Now she wings a lap around the lone man, leaving her little ones behind and tempting him to follow her. Should he tread amongst them, they will scatter, spindle-shanked and peeping, with eggshells on their heads. In the distance, there may be the cackle of a grouse, prey to the hen harrier. At another time, Macbeth might have come upon the “lek”, a communal display ground used by the polygamous male grouse to attract mates. For now, the grouse pecks at the heather, scuds over sodden sphagnum bogs, bubbling and crooning to himself, and eluding the shadow of man. Since the reign of the gun-hung gamekeeper has not yet begun, he must also elude the tooth and claw of the native wildcat if he is to dance in his lek next year.When Macbeth reaches the cairn on the flattened summit, the witches will ply him with a hallucinogenic brew. The ingredients sound disgusting, but most of them are code-words for herbs gathered somewhere in the lowlands. Shakespearean tragic heroes are fond of such places in a crisis: King Lear and his Fool came to such a place when he was insane, and learned wisdom. On his way back down the hill, a less preoccupied man might stop at a solitary rowan tree by a stone wall – the only standing tree for miles. He has need of it, for its white flowers and red berries make it a goddess tree, a tree of inspiration. He might need to pick his way through the gorse, for here it has not been piled and burnt, and were he of more tender disposition, he might repeat the old adage, “Kissing’s out of fashion when the gorse is out of bloom.” Little does he know that the witches themselves will retire to this thorny bower if ever they are pursued. But his thoughts are on matters of state: trivial, irrelevant questions to bring to this ageless place. Of course, in the end, the witches tell Macbeth nothing that the bladderwort in the bog, the wildcat in his path, the harrier in the welkin, or the bleak and pitiless moor itself could not have told him: the truth about himself.*Of course, she is quite as beautiful as all of the other young Russian girls throughout history who have one day become wives to a Tsar: a simple, uncomplicated beauty which is scorned in her own house, but would be sufficient to light up the throne room in her future palace. But today, her brow is knitted in furrows and her body trembles as she runs. In her hand she clutches a little wooden doll, her magical saviour in times of crises, and her knuckles whiten for fear of losing it. In the distance, dimly visible between the moonlit boles of the birches, there glows a great arc of paired lights: a dull, greenish glow that sets her teeth on edge. Everything within her is telling her to seek the safety of darkness in the woods rather than hurry towards the ring of light, for she knows why the lights glow from paired orbs: they are human skulls, glowing in the sockets with a magical luminescence. Beyond the skulls, which are mounted on stakes around the perimeter of a fence knitted from human bones, there stands a wretched little hut – or rather, it doesn’t stand exactly – it prances and scratches about in the dust, for it is mounted on a pair of grotesquely oversized hen’s legs. A thin plume of smoke rises from the chimney of this hovel, and momentarily obscures the moon, for its occupant is at home. She is the Baba Yaga, a hideous hag who always puts her guests to the test, and eats them if she finds them wanting. No doubt she is also the lingering folk memory of a dark goddess, for when she is not flaying the skin from warriors’ backs, she teaches her initiates the hard way, and they return to their own land filled with arcane wisdom. The young girl catches at the stitch in her side with her spare hand, and looks ahead in fear. She is Wassilissa the Beautiful, and whether she likes it or not, she is the Baba Yaga’s next initiate into the mysteries of the forest – or, if she is unworthy, into the mysteries of the cauldron, as viewed from the inside.When Wassilissa overcomes her fear and presents herself to the Baba Yaga, she is taken into the squalid hut and imprisoned there. On successive days, she is given a series of increasingly absurd and impossible tasks which need not concern us here, and whilst her magically animated wooden doll is wiping away Wassilissa’s tears and solving all her problems, the Baba Yaga has locked the door behind her, climbed into her giant iron mortar, and is now flying out across the woods, rowing along through the air with her pestle, and sweeping away her trail with her kitchen broom. Some say she is off to fight magical battles in the chthonic underworld, but more likely she is off to seek her own wisdom from the woodlands that surround her home – or, given her novel mode of transvection, those farther afield.Any normal mortal who explores a wood is likely to begin by searching for helleborines, twayblades or wood anemones in the spring and summer, or fungi in the autumn. However, for the Baba Yaga, like many other denizens of the forest, the odyssey starts not on the woodland floor, but in the treetops. Many of the birch trees in her own woodland carry “witches’ brooms” – bunched and twiggy growths which hang from the branches. To the uninitiated, these look like clumps of mistletoe; in fact, they are galls caused by a fungus which persists from year to year, sometimes producing brooms a metre in diameter, and comprising three or four hundred twigs. A single birch tree may carry nearly a hundred such excrescences at the end of its comparatively short life span of a century. Amongst the plethora of galls which afflict the neighbouring, longer-lived oak trees, one of the commonest is the “oak apple”: a rose-pink or yellow spongy ball of abnormal plant tissue which is the tree’s defensive response to the insertion of parthenogenetic eggs into the developing bud by a wingless female cynipid wasp. Every oak apple is pleurilocular, containing around thirty chambers, each a cradle for a developing grub which gorges its bloated body on juices from the tree. In late summer, the imagoes gouge their way out, leaving the oak apples riddled with tiny holes. In Britain after the Restoration of Charles II, these curious plant-tumours were worn by Royalists on May 29th, Oak Apple Day, to commemorate his birthday and return from exile. In school, children who failed to wear the regulation oak-sprig were whipped with nettles. The oak was the ideal tree to symbolise the Royalist cause, given the popular rumour that the king hid himself from his Puritan pursuers inside a hollow oak tree at Boscopel. Although the fashionably sceptical Professor Ronald Hutton has persistently denied that the celebrations might pre-date the Civil War, many have concluded that Oak Apple Day is the remnant of a pagan fertility rite. Certainly, it has gained its own neo-Pagan associations in recent centuries. When Roger Deakin attended Oak Apple Day in the Royal Forest of Grovely in Wiltshire, he found a whole range of contradictions in the involvement of conservative country people in obviously pagan rituals, apparently supported by the church, and despite the Royalist history of the rites, deeply influenced by socialist responses to the Enclosure Acts. Oak Apple Day was an “annual reassertion of rights to collect wood” on common land. In the midst of this controversy, however, no one appears to have asked the obvious question, which is why oak apples specifically should be worn. It seems a strange – or, for those with republican sympathies, oddly appropriate – symbol of monarchy: a sham fruit, a spongy cancer writhing inside with parasitic grubs. As a symbol of fertility, however, it is potent: it reminds me of nothing so much as the ontological eccentricities of the sixteenth century miller Menocchio, resurrected for posterity by that admirable historian Carlo Ginzburg, who maintained that the origin of the universe lay in putrefaction: the world was a piece of cheese from which worms spontaneously arose. In any case, it is doubtful whether the Royalists realised that the wasps responsible for this ambiguous symbol have a curious and cryptic double life-cycle. In July, the winged imagoes mate, and the females penetrate the soil, for the next generation will be infants suckling on subsided sap, parasites not of growing buds, but of hidden roots in the humus. A descent into the underworld indeed.In late July, the oak leaves are heavily mined by tiny caterpillars which live beneath the epidermis, most of them larvae of micro-moths. The Baba Yaga’s flight through the canopy is the more pleasurable because of the Purple Emperor butterflies, largest of the Lepidoptera in northern climes. The male will choose the tallest oak for his throne, and will only be tempted to the forest floor by things white and glittering, or by rotting carcasses which he can probe with his hungry tongue. Perhaps the Baba Yaga will follow him: he is unlikely to find the carcase of a badger, for they like to intern their dead within their own setts, until their skulls, forever interlocked with their jawbones, are carelessly unearthed when the dwellings require extension. It is too late, too, for the flowers of the early purple orchid, whose tubers were once the source of the invigorating, semen-thick, starchy drink known as salop, a favourite refreshment of Victorian labourers, and a renowned aphrodisiac. It was once said that there were enough purple orchids growing in Cobham Park to pleasure every seaman’s wife in Rochester. Perhaps this was another form of sympathetic magic: the twin tubers of orchids look like bollocks. The Purple Emperor flits on, over those withered stems, and alights instead on the corpse of a roebuck, already rotting. Its juices are rank and leaching into the soil, attended by burying beetles and maggots; the eye sockets are sunken. As the butterfly’s tongue begins to probe, the Baba Yaga surely pays her respects to this horned one of the woods. Modern humans think of deer as the enemies of the forest, for they chew the shoots of newly coppiced trees. Whilst this is certainly true, there ought to be room for gratitude: a deer-filled wood is a bluebell wood, for the deer clear enough foliage for these plants to gain their requisite sunlight. More importantly, in the Middle Ages, when forests were royal preserves, the trees were maintained as cover for the deer; without the deer, the woods would have been felled for pasture, and there would have been nowhere for Robin Hood to hide.At the edges of the clearings in our wood of oak and birch, the smaller trees flourish. A hazel bends over a stream, waiting to drop its wisdom-filled nuts into the water, where, perhaps, the salmon of knowledge may swallow them. The spindle tree grows here too, and when all is gaunt in winter, her rose-pink, poisonous berries will shrink to reveal orange seeds: joyful punctuations of the prevailing gloom. No doubt the Baba Yaga has cut the spindle to make wands, for its white and lightweight timber is admirably suited. Indeed, it is said that a despairing seamstress who thrusts her spindle (derived from this tree) into the ground, will soon be delighted to perceive it taking root, producing greenish-white flowers and fruit as red as roses. No wonder the archetypal witch is often depicted with distaff and spindle.These woods are the haunt of mustelids: not just the badger, but also the stoat and weasel. In winter, the stoat becomes the ermine, whose snow-white coat is a long and undulating sentence ending in a black full-stop: the tip of the tail. These tail tips, sewn with alarming profusion into trimmings of royal gowns, are the black wisps in the fluffy whitenesses which adorn the necks of mediaeval kings and queens, but in its natural state, the stoat is a wily creature with whom any witch should identify. Gamekeepers hate them, and cleave their skulls whenever they can find them, for they are crafty of mind and supple of body, and can take down creatures many times their size. The weasel is even smaller: a beady-eyed, ripple-bodied killing machine with teeth like needles. The late twelfth century Breton poet, Marie de France, who was a champion of misunderstood lovers and werewolves alike, has been one of the few authors (even the enlightened Kenneth Grahame fails in this regard) to ascribe noble qualities to the weasel. In her extraordinary lay known as Eliduc, the hero’s lover lies dead, and his longsuffering wife feels for him in his despondency. She sits weeping beside the bier of the woman who has been bedding her husband, when all at once, a weasel runs past, only to be struck dead by a stick-throwing servant standing nearby. Moments later, a second weasel, the first one’s mate, comes and finds her dead. He runs outside and picks a flower with his teeth, and uses it to revive her. In what must qualify as one of the most selfless acts in all romantic literature, Eliduc’s wife retrieves the flower, resurrects her husband’s adulterous lover, and graciously retires to a convent, and the weasels, one hopes, live on to perpetuate their species.The mixed woodlands of oak, birch and ash lie in the lowlands. The beechwoods of the chalky uplands are quite different, and the Baba Yaga would fly far to find them. Mature beeches allow little sunlight to filter down to the forest floor, and as a result, the vegetation is sparse. One flower, however, has found a niche, and its perspicacity must arouse the admiration of any witch. The bird’s nest orchid contains no chlorophyll, and as a consequence, it is not green, but yellow and fleshy, with a purplish tinge. The flowers are not gaudy, but brown, designed to attract flies, and the plant does not photosynthesise, for it is saprophytic, deriving its nutrients not from the sun but from an underground fungus with which it shares a symbiotic relationship – and the fungus, in turn, is dependent on the humus provided by the rotting foliage of the beeches. Every year, the orchid flowers by the bole of the beech, unless perchance its underground rhizomes encounter a stone. Should they do so, the plant will flower underground. A model of perverse and persevering persistence, it is surprising that the bird’s nest orchid does not play a bigger role in folklore; indeed, the only explanation for this is the fact that it is hardly ever noticed, for without green colouration, plants are nearly always presumed to be dead.It would be impossible for the Baba Yaga to frequent these woodlands without encountering a fox, and it would be unlikely indeed that she should fail to identify with him. Since the Middle Ages, the French have understood the fox most intimately, immortalising him as Reynard, the trickster who always has the last laugh. Sometimes he disguises himself as a monk, tonsuring the unsuspecting wolf with a cauldron of boiling water. On other occasions, he shams his own death, enticing birds within reach of his snapping jaws. Chaucer lets him sink his teeth into the neck of the narcissistic cockerel Chantecler, and in the mediaeval French romances, he even creates a martyr, Coupée the chicken, whose earthly life was so cruelly cut short. He presides laughingly over the castration of his rival Tybert the cat by a fornicating priest, and personally engineers the trapping of Bruin the Bear inside a cleft oak. Ever victorious, Reynard is the archetypal guiser. If you don’t believe it, seek him out yourself in a summer glade where the rabbits are chewing cowslips: he sidles along, respectfully distant, and all at once he is turning somersaults as though he has gone mad, biting the dirt and threshing at his own tail with his hindlegs. The rabbits are mesmerised by this vision of a predator turned insane; slowly they creep closer. Reynard’s game is an eloquent essay in predatory hypnosis. One rabbit strays too near, and the muscles ripple on the fox’s muzzle, the canines bared. The pupils in the yellow irises congeal into sharp lozenges of dark. Suddenly, the fox-fool is a lethal machine, and the rabbit curls, screaming in agony in the fox’s jaws. The Baba Yaga is not dissimilar in her dealings with her own victims.When winter comes, the broadleaved woods are bare, and only hollies and the occasional yew can relieve the monotony. At this time, no doubt, the Baba Yaga steers for the coniferous woodlands, eschewing only those of larch, which alone among the cone-bearing trees are deciduous. She seeks a creature every witch should revere. Of course, if we have had any contact whatever with modern environmental movements, we in Britain are immediately sure what creature she is after. It must be the red squirrel – that totemic creature whose imprint ensures fundraising success for every wildlife charity. Ousted from the woodlands of the south of our islands by the American grey – so this myth insists – the red squirrel persists in the Scotch Pines of the Highlands, staunch to the end like some latter-day Dad’s Army. We conveniently forget that it is we who introduced the grey squirrel, so that we can demonise it, and that it is we in our unprecedented population explosions of the twenty-first century who turn our woodlands into minute islands in the sea of homogeneity, dooming the less resilient species to extinction. But the Baba Yaga does not seek the red squirrel. She is after something far more elusive: a lissom-limbed creature whose every movement is sinuous, smearing pungent scents on the bark of the pine bough. His pelt is the warmest brown: dark chocolate laced with white, and had he not been persecuted to near extinction in our country, the grey squirrel would never have extended its range. Should the fresh meat run out, he is resilient enough to resort to caterpillars, or even bilberries. These days, it takes a witch to find him, led onward by the pricking of her thumbs, and even then she must crane her neck, or mount once more to the treetops in her mortar, for this creature scampers where most men scorn to look. Furtive, trembling with the pulse of a hungry metabolism, the pine marten claws the bough. Like the eyes of Wassilissa’s doll, its pupils are aglow.*The path beneath my feet is an ancient wickerwork of the roots of elms, and the ivied trunks beside me are columns in a cathedral of green, for Dutch Elm Disease has never ravaged the trees on the Isles of Scilly. Chiff-chaffs and wrens, roof-boss creatures come to life, peer between the leaves with beady eyes, and beside the raised path the little fenland supports a hundred tiny chapels of hemlock water dropwort, twinkling woodbines, and green and fleshy liverworts on gleaming walls of soil. A choir of hoverflies is singing, a tracery of elm twigs arching above them. I am on my way through the shrine to nature known as Holy Vale, heading towards Porth Hellick, a bay gouged into the granite on the eastern side of the island of St. Mary’s. As I emerge from the fenland, where herons and egrets curl their harpoon-headed necks like question-marks, the dromedary-shaped geological feature known as Camel Rock looms in front of me. Shallow sea-water laps over the bladder-wrack as I make my way past it, and out in the deeper water, I glimpse the arched Roman-nose of a grey seal, his nostrils flared to drink in the air. Suddenly, he submerges, and I time the interval before his re-emergence, not daring to hold my own breath. He has exhaled before diving, every pocket of air expelled from shrunken alveoli, his bloodstream constricted, for this reduces his buoyancy. His blood is almost black in colour, for it is packed with haemoglobin in order to carry additional reserves of oxygen during the dive. Three, four, five minutes, and his head is bobbing up ahead, like a stub-nosed buoy with whiskers. Gulls skim the sea’s dark undulations. A cormorant dives, and turnstones cry. The sun turns the sea mercurial, and the shoreline is a mirror with a glazed meniscus. As the old seal breasts the surge, I almost hear the slop of mercury, and then the sun shifts, the sea a green glaze crusted with foam. The boulders beside the path are mounded with unsalvaged disjecta: a winkle, a pebble, a cormorant’s skull.Beyond Camel Rock, an ancient stairway has been cut into the stone. Ahead of me, the cliff forms a great overhang, known locally as Clapper Rock. One can imagine it rapping like a gargantuan castanet on a windy night, and in the past I have taken children here on bivouacs, and they have scared each other sleepless with tales of the ghosts of suicides. As I mount the stairs, the light intensifies; the stones seem to be vibrating. Spectral figures climb the stairs ahead of me, shawled and murmuring, disappearing behind a curve in the rocky cleft. I know who they are. In 1750, Robert Heath wrote the first ever book about the Isles of Scilly, and in it he described a collective of Healing Aunts whose traditions had been handed down from time immemorial. “They are all good Botanists,” he tells us, “and have added a great many Herbs to their Catalogue… Their Systems and Hypotheses are to help those in Distress for Pity’s sake rather than for Profit.” In 1750, the most senior amongst them was Sarah Jenkins, a wise-woman and midwife of considerable local standing. That she was also a witch seems very likely: in her youth she certainly knew of the fairies which inhabited the chambered cairn of Buzza Hill near Hugh Town, whose “nightly Pranks, aerial Gambols, and Cockel-shell Abodes are now quite unknown.” Supposedly, they were “charm’d” or “conjur’d out of the islands” by cunning-men from Cornwall, but surely I have seen them myself, belted with leather of Laminaria, their menfolk in britches of kelp, their women skirted with Porphyra, with purses of bladder-wrack, stitched with strands of Chorda. I am sure that to this day they dance to tunes of fiddles fashioned out of the skulls of guillemots, and beat on urchin drums.I think I know where the ghosts of the Healing Aunts are going. They are heading across the heath towards the beach of Pelistry, beyond which lies Toll’s Island, a grassy clump of rock connected to the beach by a sand-bank at low tide. In the eighteenth century, Toll’s Island would have hung under a pall of noisome smoke, for it was covered with kelp-pits tended by wizened old ladies puffing perversely on blackened clay pipes. The kelp was burned to a fine ash and then exported for use in glass-making, a meagre source of revenue for the poverty-stricken island folk. Beyond the kelp-pits stands Pellew’s Redoubt, a relic of the Civil War, from which not even these islands, twenty-eight miles into the Atlantic, were entirely free. At the far end, the sea slops and gurgles against the rocks, and it is here, I am sure, that the Healing Aunts are heading. The rockpools here are a candy-shop of colours: Coralina plants, articulated like puppets and pink as musk, kelps, oar shaped, made of chocolate leather, and edible sea lettuces, pistachio green. I bend down and dip my hands in the water. There is the sideways scuttle of a retreating crab, a frightened goby’s blinkless eye, the urchin’s serried army bristling. There are limpets and pixie cups and slowly moving snails clearing trails in sand. Despite the turmoil and pounding of the sea, delicate anemones spread their tentacles, or lie above the waterline like globules of blind red jelly.Here the Healing Aunts will find Dillisk, a membrane-thin ribbon of red seaweed known to the Scots as Dulse, Rhodymenia palmata. Shawled in ragged wool, Sarah Jenkins bends hunchbacked over the rocks, plucks with scrabbling fingers the limp Dillisk from the stone, or rolls up her grubby sleeve, and picks it where it swells in swirling ribbons underwater. It clings to her skin as though it has been smeared with bacon grease. Rich in iodine, Dillisk has long been an essential component of the diet of coastal peoples, and during the Irish potato blight, it doubtless saved lives. Hanging in the kitchen, it withers at the edges, grows a powdery crust of salt, and stiffens like red parchment, until wet weather leaves it hanging flaccid: it is, in fact, the world’s first barometer. Combined with sea lettuce and mixed with oatmeal, it is fried to make nutritious cakes. The seaweed known as “Irish moss” grows here too, its fronds rainbowed with bioluminescence under water. Medicinally, it is an anticoagulant, and a treatment for bronchitis, bladder infections and kidney irritation; it is also an effective gelling agent. The seaweeds are used here for fertilisers too, and wrack-cutters were equipped with special scythes for the purpose of harvesting the larger plants. Other seaweeds had folkloric significance: Viking descendents on Iceland were afraid of a hideous child-eating troll-woman named Grýla, whose coat was made of seaweed, and whose fifteen tails were made of the knotted wrack, Ascophyllum nodosum. In addition to her child-devouring cat, she had a string of husbands, none of whom could bear her carnivorous habits for very long, until at last she found a sort of happiness with Leppalúði, who was able to quell his nausea for long enough to father a multitude of offspring upon her, all of whom preyed upon human children. Similarly, Norse burial grounds on the Orkneys were later identified as homes of the Trows, semi-aquatic monsters who preyed on human souls. According to Jo Ben, writing in the early seventeenth century, the Stronsay Trows “very often go with the women there”, and they are clad in red seaweed, with horse-like bodies. A Trow’s penis, too, “is like that of a horse”, and the testicles are particularly large. At the opposite extreme of Britain, Scilly too is covered with cairns and tombs, and it seems reasonable to suppose that in former ages, these also had their fair complement of seaweed-clad monsters. On a windy night on Scilly, it is difficult to believe that they do not exist.No doubt the Healing Aunts did not confine their ministry to St Mary’s. There are five inhabited islands in Scilly today, but in their day, Samson too was inhabited by two wind-worn families, the Woodcocks and the Webbers, who eked out an existence by fishing and kelp-burning before they were evicted in the nineteenth century by the lord of Tresco, Augustus Smith, who built a deer-park on the island, only to find that the deer scorned the place and swam back to Tresco. It is certain that there were magical traditions – not all of them entirely benevolent – on the other islands too, for the well of St. Warna on St. Agnes was once filled with bent pins, each designed to cause a shipwreck, and St. Agnes herself is represented in paintings with a stang, luring tall ships onto the rocks. However, today I will follow the Healing Aunts back to Hugh Town, and take their spectral boat to Samson. On the way, a sandwich tern is above me, slouch-winged and still in the air as a strained lever. All about the boat now, they hover, their necks cocked like flintlocks, their stretched wings bracketing the wind, the watchspring wound, near to breaking. The flintlock springs, and one bird makes a soundless plunge, harpoon-billed and hollow boned. For a moment, it is a stab of white cleaving the water. A sand-eel writhes, and the tern bursts shimmer-feathered back into the air. Riding this swell in winter, I might meet the Immer Loon, or Great Northern Diver, a bird whose ancestors once swum with ichthyosaurs.There is no jetty on Samson: the spectral boat beaches on the sand of Bar Point at low tide. The beach is a white hump, with a single line of weed. At the top, there is dune grass bleached by brine, and in the spring, pyramidal orchids bloom in profusion. On Dune Hill, the first of Samson’s two granite humps, there is a string of cairns from the days when Scilly was known as Ennor. There is yellow furze, gnarled ling, and a petering path, lined with thrushes’ anvils, each with its own snail-shell cairn. Always, there are the wind-flayed sternums of gulls, rock-pipits, and once fearless wrens, the bleached wings still attached. I will follow the Aunts down the hill, towards the spume-worn Neck, and enter this empty, roofless home to my right, stooping beneath the rafter that would have been. There is an uncanny, unfathomable silence. I can almost hear the wheeze of a Woodcock, his clay pipe clenched in stained incisors. The air here is thick, and it is hard to breathe, for there is an emptiness, like the orbs of a gull’s skull. Up the slope towards South Hill, another house beckons me, armpit deep in foxgloves and red-campions, and fringed with nettles - nitrogen-loving plants which frequent the past abodes of human beings. The hard-hewn lintel is perched precarious as a bird, and inside, the low hearth is lichen-bearded. There is the same silence, the same thickness, the same constriction of the throat; I know I am breathing ghosts, not air. I half-hear the sigh of a Webber, worn from kelp-burning, aching to rest her legs beside the fire that would have been. And now I am back out into the vacancies of brown bracken, walking by bluebells, grown wild from some garden long-gone.The silences of Samson, here at the Atlantic end of the British Isles, hold within them the profoundest lesson a witch can learn. We humans are transitory: we are walking ghosts. Our hearths encrust; our lintels fall. Our clay pipes lie crushed in the strand. Our remnants are chipped flints, stone bottle stoppers, plastic flotsam. Our broken boats encrust with goose-barnacles. The Healing Aunts knew this: they have brought me here so I may know it too. The wounds we inflict on nature are skin deep; it will master us in the end. If you don’t believe me, take the tourist-boat to Samson – the modern Scillonians will gladly take your money. Sit up there on South Hill and listen. Hear their yawls and cries. Glance down at their mottled eggs on the peaty pathways. Samson does not belong to human beings. It is owned by gulls, and the ghosts of all that would have been. |
| 撮影日 | 2009-01-25 16:07:00 |
| 撮影者 | Giles Watson's poetry and prose , Oxfordshire, England |
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