Of 'Imbolc' (St Brigid's Day)

St Brigid's Cross made from rushes. 

In these parts the first day of Spring is traditionally 1st Feb, St Brigid's Day. Houses and shops are decorated with square crosses made of soft rushes and we have joined in with this each year; 2015 was no different. St Brigid is one of the three Patron Saints of Ireland (with Patrick and Columba); she covers the female side of things being associated with the first day of Spring, a Christianised version of the pre Christian festival of 'Imbolc'.

An ominous sky brought us another dusting of snow.

Imbolc is Irish for 'from the womb' or giving birth so as you'd expect it has all the good pagan re-birth, new season and fertility associations and if you put up your cross(es) you protect your house, land, crops and livestock from all ills. One version of the legend includes protection from fire, but this seems to be an exclusively pre-Christian story and does not feature in the Christian legend, which is mainly about crops and animals. You would put up your cross at doorways of house and also of byres and barns. Each year, when the new cross was made, the old could be taken down, broken up and spread all around your grounds, the better to spread the straw, by then blessed by St Brigid across all your fields. We've been putting ours on the compost we hope that works too.

The young Buffs like to stand on the terrace table. The boys
are now up for sale through 'classified ads' website, Donedeal.ie

Crosses would also be given to newly weds to give them a good start in life, and might be pinned up into the under-thatch (no ceilings in those days) of the house, where they would add a new cross each year so that you could tell how long the couple had lived in that house by counting the crosses. In Mayo, they put out a piece of red ribbon to be blessed by Brigid as she passes over.We also read that we have been wrong in making the cross on The Day. The festival would have formerly included the 'Eve' before and the family would be making their crosses then, on the 31st January. Ah well.

There are, as you'd also expect, a wealth of stories around St Brigid's life and the miracles she has performed.

Muck spreading for Bob again. 

In one, says 'Wikipedia', "A pagan chieftain from the neighborhood of Kildare was dying. Christians in his household sent for Brigid to talk to him about Christ. When she arrived, the chieftain was raving. As it was impossible to instruct this delirious man, hopes for his conversion seemed doubtful. Brigid sat down at his bedside and began consoling him. As was customary, the dirt floor was strewn with rushes both for warmth and cleanliness. Brigid stooped down and started to weave them into a cross, fastening the points together. The sick man asked what she was doing. She began to explain the cross, and as she talked, his delirium quieted and he questioned her with growing interest. Through her weaving, he converted and was baptized at the point of death. Since then, the cross of rushes has existed in Ireland". 

Spread muck.

In a second she was pleading with the King of Leinster for land on which to build a Nunnery, but he just laughed at her. She prayed to God to soften his heart and then asked for just as much land as her cloak would cover. He agreed. She got four assistant nuns to each grab a corner of the square cloth and to start running north, south, east and west and (Lo! ?) her cloak expanded as if to cover the whole province. "Whoa!" shouts the King, knowing he's been had but relents and gives her good plot for the building. Soon he also agrees to be converted to Christianity.

Bob's trusty John Deere 5310.

In dozens of other stories she does healing or giving to the poor, converting people and plenty of other saintly stuff but if you are interested in that then I'll let you away and do your own research. We are busy here with First Day of Spring type jobs, spring cleaning and the like. I seem to have become JD Bob's mucker-out of choice. I'm not sure how this happened, but I don't mind and I do get to play with the tractor. Getting a mucky barn clean and ready for new straw is a job I love, which may make me a bit odd and it was a chance to give real help to Bob while he had 'flu'.

The range gets a 'blacking'. It's like new!

He's over the 'flu' now but obviously has no problem with his nutty neighbour forking poo about for him even though this year I don't actually want the muck myself as I still have a great heap of 2014 muck not yet spread on the garden and veg plot. This stuff is getting spread on Bob's "medder" (the small 'meadow' field just by the house) the old fashion way, flinging forkfulls across the grass in between short trundles of the tractor or, in the case of the sloppy stuff, letting it dribble off the 'link-box' as I drive along with it gently tipped backwards.

Meanwhile, as well as blitzing the house (possibly because we thought we were going to have a visit!) Liz has given the range a once-over with 'black'. It looks as good as new. Not so good, our ever-faithful little Fiat car may be going sick on us. It seems to falter once in a while as if there is an ignition problem and on Saturday, when Liz went to start it, it fired up on only 3 cylinders and did that white smoke, unburnt fuel thing that gives you the FEAR and makes you dread open-engine type faults like burnt valves and head gasket leaks. It recovered as it warmed up. This morning, though, we have had it down to our marvellous local village garage where Jimmy H has examined it and plugged in his fancy disgnostic gadget. This found a coil/circuit problem but he cleared that code and the engine seems now to be fine. We have been sent off to drive it round for a few days normally and see if the fault comes back. We are re-assured that if the fault can come and go, then it is "probably not" burnt valves or the head gasket. Valves tend to burn out and stay burned out. Fingers crossed, 'Timbuktu' (the car's name, derived from the old UK registration).

Foodie Memories

Bathchaps - traditional West Country fare

Mentor Anne, we know, is exploring the possibilities of pig ownership as are we. She too has obtained a half carcass to practise the processing and food making part of this project on, the sausages, butchery and so on. But Anne is a West Country girl and her memories hark back to traditional foods she would eat as a youngster growing up so her most recent post on her blog, which I follow, talks of "Bathchaps", brined, rolled and boiled chunks of pig cheek meat (and lower jaw sometimes) which taste reminiscent of ham.

 http://anirishalternative.blogspot.ie/2014/01/the-real-thing.html

I have never met these before and apparently one of the last manufacturers of Bathchaps (working in Bridport) may be about to stop production. We may be able to correct this omission soon as Anne is trying to get some exported to her and will also be trying to make her own when she gets to the 'pig's head' stage. Till then we have been going down the brawn route, as you know.

Traditional Dublin Gur Cakes

Here, in contrast, it is a glut of eggs which is exercising our bakers and the Irish women in our circle have been looking at sweeter fare from their own childhood tradition, namely Gur Cakes. These traditionally Dublin confections involve pastry top and bottom but a filling made with stale bread moistened with 'tay' and treacle and mashed in with all manner of dried fruits. Another one I have not knowingly eaten but which looks like my all time favourite type of cake, the Eccles Cake.

First make your bread go stale!

Gur Cakes would have been a way of using up your stale left over bread. Round here, bread does not hang around long enough to go stale, especially when there is brawn to make into sandwiches, so Liz found herself having to deliberately 'save' some bread to then make it go stale! I look forward to trying out the Gur Cakes and maybe also a sliver of Bathchap to taste.

Meanwhile we chug on gently through our Irish Garden Bird Survey, which runs from December right through to the first week in March. We have not had any unusual surprises but have had regular counts of all the usual suspects - the 15-strong mob of chaffinches which tidy up the left chicken corn in the yard, the grey-bodied hooded crows which are the only type we get here and a single 'drive-through' by our raven ('Quoth'). We have regular goldcrests and tree creepers in our black spruce, normally around 7 blackbirds, 5 robins and a couple of fieldfares.

One poor little mite which will not be featuring in any more weeks of the survey is this wren, one of the 5 or so we see regularly nipping about in the ivy and the log stacks and walls around the yard. Unfortunately Rolo the cat caught this one last night and Liz only saw him bringing back the tiny brown shape by chance. She rescued him and told off the cat (much good will that do!) and we almost wrote him off, but in the warmth of my hand he seemed to come to a bit.

RIP An Dreoilín, caught by the cat, Rolo

His little eyes opened and he seemed to be taking an interest in things, so we left him quietly in a warm, dry box to maybe recover through the night. Sadly, he never made it and his stiff, cold little form was there in the box this morning. Presumably shock or internal injuries caused by Rolo's attentions. Rolo was scolded and made to write out 100 times "I must not kill anything with feathers" on the blackboard before he was allowed to go home from school. Poor little wren.

Flatpack bee hive and protective outfits

On Saturday we drove through the sleety wet snow, back to our 'Two Marys' beyond Drumshanbo to buy some bee equipment, taking advantage of their January sale prices. We'd intended to only buy the hive in the sale which was going to be a flat pack which we would build but, to cut a long story short, we took shelter from the rain in the clothing store and got tempted to start trying on the caps, veils and over-trousers; our bee keeper "space-suits". Liz was sorted easily but this gear is made in India by small people and we struggled a bit to find sizes which worked with my long arms and (cough cough) broad shoulders. You do not want cuffs too tight or arms too short which might pull up while you are working, exposing the flesh of wrists and forearms to the bees' stinging bits.

We got there in the end and came home happy with our car load. Still no bees, yet. Too cold for them till June, but our names are now down in black and white on the waiting list for our Nucleus ('nuke') box. The other thing we are waiting for is any of the wax 'foundation' sheet used in the hive frames. These sheets are pre-moulded with an 'embossed' hexagon pattern to give the bees a clue where to start 'drawing out' the wax tubular brood cells and (later) honey comb. The manufacturers do not like making the foundation or shipping it about when the weather is too cold, as the sheets are very brittle. They wait till the weather warms up and the sheets become more pliable.

Last but not least, another year has come round to Feb 1st and the day we make our St Brigid's crosses from the local rushes. Far fewer rushes about now we are pleased to say, after all our hard work mowing, scything, strimmer-ing, sheep grazing, goose grazing, rabbit grazing and horse grazing but we found enough to do a cross a-piece to keep in with the tradition.

Was She Listening?

Perhaps St Brigid was listening yesterday and looked down on our rather beginner-ish making of the crosses and approved. For what ever the reason we finally got a beautiful spring-like day today, on the 2nd Feb. The sun shone and was warm, quickly burning off any frost on the grass and melting the thin ice on the water in the wheel barrows. The sky was clear blue and the birds sang. There was barely a breath of wind. All encouraged, I nipped a load of laundry into the machine and hung it on the line outside to dry. Some of it even dried! That seems like the first time we've been able to do that since early December. My younger brother has just flown off to the Algarve in search of the sun. He could have stayed here. OK, maybe we are not THAT warm, but spring is definitely round the corner.

The lack of wind and rain mean that I can move my goose-house making operation out of doors, which is handy as the finished house will be 3' by 4' by 3' and would not fit through the Tígín doors once built. Yesterday, cowering from the icy blast and lashing rain, I had started off but concentrated on completing single panels to build myself effectively a 'flat pack'. Today I would have a chance to put it all together and so finish the roof, hinged door flap and bolt.

It was so warm that I was able to work in a polo short and sweatshirt, even rolling up the sleeves at one stage. I did, though, put on my garden knee-pads; the concrete was a bit cold and damp for too much kneeling. We have now put this house in the orchard so that the geese can get to know it, get used to it and, who knows, even learn to love it and use it. They are currently over-nighting in the calf house and we have a little routine where I release them in the morning and they waddle off up the cattle race to the 'pond garden' and orchard. Then about 5 p.m. I go out and find them and they happily waddle back into the yard and into their calf house where I shut the door and give them their supper of sprouted wheat (this has proved to be very palatable and the geese love it, hoovering it up).

On the dog walk today, which took me down to Feigh Bridge, I took a camera. Today may be dry and warm, but the recent heavy rain has filled our little local lough, Lough Feigh to what seems to be an unprecedented level, at least in local memory. Lough Feigh seems to spend most of its life as little more than a water filled raggedy ditch surrounded by tall bull-rushes and other reeds, so that what open water there is can not easily be seen from our lane. Suddenly it is a decent sized, expanse of shining water with swans a-swimming and geese honking. When the nieces were up in August we went down through John Deere Bob's fields to look and had to walk miles across wet boggy grass to get to the lake's edge.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to get good photos from our lane as we run along the top of a round-backed ridge. I will have to consult my local maps and see if there is a road or path which runs closer to the edge before all this watery magnificence drains away. Lough Feigh is unusual in having no river draining into it and only a tiny, convoluted ditch draining out. It seems to get its water just from our ridge and the River Lung runs in a neighbouring valley just to its south. The twisty turny 'ditch' joins the two only when the lough is at its fullest. Perhaps this is the start of spring and the lough can return to 'raggedy ditch' once again.