‘Feith Mhoire’

Ditch of Mary,
Ditch of Mary;
Heron legs,
Heron legs;
Ditch of Mary,
Ditch of Mary;
Heron legs under you,
Bridge of warranty before you…

“Flat moorland is generally intersected with innumerable reins, channels and ditches. Sometimes these are serious obstacles to cattle, more especially to cows, which are accurate judges. When a cow hesitates to cross, the person driving her throws a stalk or a twig into the ditch before the unwilling animal and sings the Feith Mhoire, Vein of Mary, to encourage her to cross, and to assure her that the bridge is before her.”

p.162 and p.613 ‘Carmina Gadelica’, Alexander Carmichael, Edinburgh 1899

Crottal. Some Hebridean fishermen would not wear jumpers knitted with wool dyed from crottal. They believed that because crottal grew on the rocks on the moor it would be naturally attracted to the rocks on the seabed if they fell into the water.

Brackish: where the peaty water of the Hebridean moor meets the salt water of the North Atlantic.

Our Lady of the Crossing.
The west coast of Scotland is a place dominated by the meetings of water and land: Atlantic on shoreline; cloud on mountain; mountain and sea; places in-between neither land nor water where sphagnum mosses form. In such places of flux, unsteady ground and danger people call on the otherworldly for assistance. Before the bridge was built at Ballahulish a short but treacherous ferry crossing avoided a twenty five mile trip round the shores of Loch Leven. Near there a peat cutter unearthed this ancient goddess in her woven bower.

https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/stories/scottish-history-and-archaeology/ballachulish-figure/

 

Our Lady of the Bog.

 

Our Lady of the Land, Our Lady of the Sea,
Bring to our nets herring, in the furrows of the waters,
To our harvest- waves of barley, of wheat and of oats.

Herring bone peat stack

Herring girls/ herring bone peat.

‘Their laughter like a sprinkling of salt

showered from their lips,

brine and pickle on their tongues,

and the stubby short fingers that could handle fish,

or lift a child gently, neatly

safely, wholesomely, unerringly,

and the eyes that were as deep as a calm’

Ruaraidh MacThòmais (Derick Thomson)

more moor metal

 

Moor metal