Dochan Poetry Update

The blog yesterday brought me an unusual flurry of comments - on Facebook, Twitter and by text.

Most folk were reminding me of the dochan's soothing properties on nettle stings. 

No, I hadn't forgotten that. Growing up in Orkney, this is the kind of information you absorb at your mother's knee. Probably as she's turning you pink with calamine lotion from some other assault on your skin.

Here we didn't use full-grown dochan leaves, though, as most folk describe: we went straight to the heart of the budding leaf and slimed our nettle stings good and proper with the cool, clear, sticky juice.

After my fruitless searches for poems about dochans, my cousin Rhona sent me a very nice one. 

The Dock

Come here, son: look! that leaf is dock, Beside the dandelion clock.

Wherever stinging nettle grows There, too, the healing dock leaf blows

As if to show some grand Design Of Mother Nature, all benign,

Who suffers with her children's pain And longs to make them well again:

Who cannot but provide relief As in this sting-­removing leaf.

………………………..

Or are there flowers that can abate The pain when people love, or hate?

No: men and towns to dust return: The fires drink up the clouds, and burn.

Oh no, relief is never there. Come, we must go: and son, beware,

For where the balmy dock leaves stand Are stinging nettles close at hand.

***

The same poem was sent to me via Twitter by The Little Bookshop @1littlebookshop, who sent a link to another blog, Herbs-Treat and Taste, which gives a detailed account of the dochan's healing properties with quotes from Thomas Culpepper and George Eliot! The Little Bookshop had in turn been alerted to my quest by Zoe Toft @playbythebook, who had recently visited Orkney and been most impressed by Orkney Library & Archive. 

No author appeared on the poem from either source. Does anyone know who wrote it?

I also got some playful suggestions via Twitter:

Caryl Hart ‏@carylhart115 Aug

@playbythebook @orkneyreader A dock leaf soothes a nettle sting// it really is a useful thing.

Sarah McIntyre ‏@jabberworks15 Aug

@playbythebook @OrkneyReader There is a young dock plant named Steve Who has an overwhelming pet peeve:

Imagine the embarrassing thing Being a cure for nettle sting On your bum, that'll make him most grieve.

My sister Catherine, who recited Flying Crooked, reminded me that dochans were where we searched for - and found - 'ladybirds'. They weren't ladybirds, though: the black-spotted red beetles were unknown in Orkney when I was growing up. No, they were green beetles, green and bluey with a metallic bronze sheen. We used to collect them and keep them in a jar with holes punched in the lid. And some dochans inside of course, for them to eat.

Catherine also reminded me of another use we made of the dochan in our games. When we played hooses and cooked mince and tatties, brown dochan seeds were the mince, white curly doddies, the tatties and pineapple weed, the peas.

And look what has just arrived in my e-mail inbox from Orkney poet Yvonne Gray! This is by William Barnes who wrote Linden Lea.

Dock-Leaves

The dock-leaves that do spread so wide
 Up yonder zunny bank's green zide,
 Do bring to mind what we did do
 At plaÿ wi' dock-leaves years agoo:
 How we,--when nettles had a-stung
 Our little hands, when we wer young,--
 Did rub em wi' a dock, an' zing
 "_Out nettl', in dock. In dock, out sting._"
 An' when your feäce, in zummer's het,
 Did sheen wi' tricklèn draps o' zweat,
 How you, a-zot bezide the bank,
 Didst toss your little head, an' pank,
 An' teäke a dock-leaf in your han',
 An' whisk en lik' a leädy's fan;
 While I did hunt, 'ithin your zight,
 Vor streaky cockle-shells to fight.

 In all our plaÿ-geämes we did bruise
 The dock-leaves wi' our nimble shoes;
 Bwoth where we merry chaps did fling
 You maïdens in the orcha'd swing,
 An' by the zaw-pit's dousty bank,
 Where we did taït upon a plank.
 --(D'ye mind how woonce, you cou'den zit
 The bwoard, an' vell off into pit?)
 An' when we hunted you about
 The grassy barken, in an' out
 Among the ricks, your vlèe-èn frocks
 An' nimble veet did strik' the docks.
 An' zoo they docks, a-spread so wide
 Up yonder zunny bank's green zide,
 Do bring to mind what we did do,
 Among the dock-leaves years agoo.

Yvonne also kindly sent me a link to an internet post about dock pudding, something I had never heard of, made with dochan leaves, oatmeal and onions!

And she has found these visual artists - links below - who weren't shy of using dochans in their art. I particularly like Richard Shilling's Dock Leaf Sun Squares.

http://www.richardshilling.co.uk/photo_4833085.html

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-dock-leaves-and-two-cows-d07093

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pd/r/richard_doyle,_under_the_dock.aspx

http://myideamine.com/Beetlebirdhare/?page_id=1332

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this ongoing discussion about dochans! It seems they not only have had poems written about them, have medicinal and culinary uses, but also hold a good deal of fascination for a lot of folk. Thank you. 

LATE EDITION - LATE EDITION - LATE EDITION - LATE EDITION

Sylvia Hays sent me a lovely poem of hers in which she mentions dochans - dockweed - and has kindly given permission to print it here:

Totem

She noses into my dew-bellied fur, not knowing,

not knowing, when I catapulted into darkness

away over the dyke, towards last week’s waning moon,

not knowing that time refracted in my eyes and lit the way.

The earth was still, even vole prey curled

silent in their holes.

Only constellations moved, a starlit

scatter over dockweed, thistle, nettle.

I crept pier-wards, mindful of my territory,

rummaged softly into creel and net.

The stars were sinking, fading into dawn

as she, not knowing, slept on.

My body clock’s command pulled me back

towards the magnet of her, of home.

I howled her out of dreams

to let  me in.

She noses into my fur, dew-bellied,

but does she know, can she detect,

earth scent, dry weed ochre,

the smell of fish amongst my stripes? 

Sylvia Hays

11 February 2006

Dochans & Nettles & Butterflies & Wild Pansies

I've been hunting for a poem about dochans but to no avail. It seems that the poor dochan - unlike the nettle and the thistle - has never so far been celebrated in verse.

This surprises me. And pains me a little. The garden of our newly built house, a brown field site in mid-June, is now a wash of brilliant green, courtesy of the dochan.

Nonetheless, I have been fighting a rearguard action to extricate and contain it, for it is vigorous and abundant enough to choke out any namby pamby garden plant I might like to grow. One small segment of dochan root left in the earth will next year have a head of emerald leaves. One seed escaping down into the soil can remain dormant for forty years, before thrusting upwards into the light of day. Respect!

There are thistles too, though less plentiful. And yet thistles have poems. Here's one by George Mackay Brown:

Thistles

Walk along the way of our year
Past the stations 
Of snowdrop, crocus, the

Marvellous green trumpets opening 
To announce
Voar, spring, Easter,

A troop of yellow coats, daffodils
Jostling in ditches,
Laughing along the wind;

The fluent tulips;
The poppies like blood splashes;
The rare secret

Yesnaby primula
That will not root 
In sealess rockeries, southward;

Rose; seapink; meadowsweet ...
But few praise
The tinker thistle, the outlaw;

Knives in his belt, whetted,
A tall swaggerer going
With his tribe down

Lost lanes of summer.

Nettles too, I've come to realise, are quite a bonny plant, with their crimped leaves and purple hearts. If they didn't sting my feet in my sandals when I'm hanging out washing, I might let them stay. Edward Thomas praised them in a poem:

Tall Nettles

Tall nettles cover up, as they have done 
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough 
Long worn out, and the roller made of stone: 
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now. 

This corner of the farmyard I like most: 
As well as any bloom upon a flower 
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost 
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.

But dochans have no champion. Or at least none I have found. When my two sisters came to stay, Maggie and I were clearing dochans and other weeds at the back of the house when Catherine who had gone in for a rest, appeared at the door and, observing two winged creatures above our bent heads, spontaneously recited a poem from memory:

Flying Crooked

The butterfly, a cabbage-white, 
(His honest idiocy of flight) 
Will never now, it is too late, 
Master the art of flying straight, 
Yet has - who knows so well as I? - 
A just sense of how not to fly: 
He lurches here and here by guess 
And God and hope and hopelessness. 
Even the acrobatic swift 
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

Robert Graves

Along with the cabbage white's erratic flight, it was swallows that swooped in and out of our vision that day, not swifts, but the line could equally apply to them.

So there are three lowly specimens of the natural world that have poems dedicated to them. 

Who will write about the dochan?

Today, as I waded through their lush greenery, I glimpsed something bright under the leaves. I parted them carefully and found this!

A wild pansy! And then I remembered a story my mother told about wild pansies:

"One year when I was small – about ten or eleven maybe, there was a field next to the yard at home, which was sown with oats, but it also had a myriad of wild pansies – violets – in the corner of the field where there were no oats.

And there they were, the violets, a magical triangle of hundreds of wild violets.  I picked them – as many as my small hands would hold.  I buried my face in their cool, exquisite scent – how can I tell you what it was like – the flowers were purple and yellow, rich, violent colours, but they felt so cool and the scent was so delicate – my lips felt the silkiness of the flowers and my hands, cupped round a huge bunch, felt the absolute opulence of such splendour – more flowers than I could hold.  Oh, the complete delight of that experience – I can see the lovely purple of the petals – I can feel the silky cool touch of them on my mouth. I can smell the faint almost ‘no scent’ of the flowers. I only need to close my eyes and I can taste the ‘violets’."

What my mother leaves out of this account is that she walked back towards the house with her armful of 'violets', turned a corner and, instead of fields empty save for a few dairy cows grazing, saw trucks and men pouring in and tents going up. This was her first sight of the platoon of soldiers who were to be billeted on her father's small farm during the war. 

I'll let my mother's words stand in for a poem about dochans. It was dochans that sheltered that single wild pansy in my garden and recalled to me my mother's memory.

George Mackay Brown The Collected Poems
Edward Thomas
Robert Graves

EXPLORING ANTARCTICA WITH GAVIN FRANCIS

It was while he worked as a doctor in the sweltering heat of the tropics by the Indian Ocean in Kenya that Gavin Francis first dreamed of travelling to colder climes. The tropics for him were not 'palm tree-strewn beaches' to lie about on, but relentless sun and teeming humanity. Perhaps it's not surprising that it was there that he conceived a desire to experience its antithesis: Cold and Emptiness.

For a time he worked as a GP in Stromness. Then he travelled further North through Unst in Shetland to the Faroes and on to Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard, Lapland. His account of these travels, True North, became an award winning book fascinating to all those for whom the north holds mystery and allure.

But he is clearly a man of opposites. His trip to the far north accomplished, he felt the call of the south. The extreme south: Antarctica. He spent six months there with the British Antarctic Survey in the company mainly of Emperor penguins.

In an interview on BBC Radio Orkney this morning he told Fionn McArthur how he became entranced by the place and by the penguins. 'It's so empty,' he said, 'the only species that survives there apart from humans, is the penguins. I'm not a specialist bird watcher or a twitcher, but I became fascinated by them and their behaviour.'

His book, Empire Antarctica is the result of that fascination. 

Fionn recognised that in this new book the writing is even 'more assured' and Gavin Francis agreed. He hopes, he says, to go on developing as a writer, because good writing is important to him.

There is a unique chance to come and see Gavin Francis at this stage in his writing journey. He will be visiting Orkney again on Monday to talk about his new book and to show his amazing slides of the area. Expect stunning images of aurora borealis, sunrises, sunsets, ice, spindrift. And Emperor Penguins.

Gavin Francis

7.00 pm

Monday 5 August

Orkney Library & Archive

The event is FREE but TICKETED

Phone: 01856 873166 to make sure you get your ticket!

Come on now, form an orderly queue!

THE STONE BLOGS #2: Eyin Helga, Eynhallow, Holy Isle, Hildaland

Last night I went to Eynhallow for the first time in my life. I used to look across at it from Evie where my fella stayed. Sometimes in the late evening sun the island stood out so clearly I felt as if I could step across the Burgar Roost and land dry-shod on its shores. Other times it disappeared entirely into the mist and left Rousay lowering darkly out of an otherwise seemingly empty sound. 

Maybe this is why it became associated with Hildaland, the island of the Finn Folk, mostly hidden from mortal eyes, but sometimes glimpsed by Orcadians travelling by. The guide last night told the assembled folk who had sailed out on the annual Orkney Heritage Society trip the story of how Hildaland was tricked away from the Finn Folk and claimed for mortal Orcadians.

There seemed to be plenty trickery afoot last night, enough to put folk off stepping onto the shore. When we disembarked, thousands of shrieking terns rose from the rocks like a storm of needles and made us humans feel very unwelcome indeed. We steered clear of them, though, and headed out sunwise round the island to see the archaeological remains; those who wanted to see the birdlife walked off widdershins. 

One of the main attractions on Eynhallow - named Eyin Helga, Holy Island, by the Vikings - is a chapel and monastery dating back to the 12th Century. It is a Romanesque structure with impressive arches and there are mysteries surrounding it. Check out the excellent Orkneyjar website for more information about Eynhallow, the facts and the fiction, the mysteries and the speculation. 

It struck me once again, that the building methods for dry-stane dykes - see previous blog - have remained the same for centuries.  Millennia even, as we shall see ... 

Here is what Jo Ben said about Eynhallow in 1529 in his Descriptio Insularum Orchadiarum:

"ENHALLOW

Enhallow, as if it were, the Holy Island, and very small.

It is of old times related that here, if the standing corn be cut down, after the setting of the sun, unexpectedly there is a flowing of blood from the stalks of the grain; also it is said that if a horse is fastened, after sun-down it will easily get loose and wander anywhere during the night [without hindrance from any one, if indeed these be not hindrance from evil intent.

Here you may discern the futitious and fabulous traditions of these people."

(This information is quoted from Orkneyjar website, as above.)

Eynhallow, with its holy order of monks lost sight of down the centuries, had an important part to play in the imagination of George Mackay Brown.

In George Mackay Brown:The Wound and the Gift, Ron Ferguson's exploration of GMB's literary and spiritual journey, he quotes a conversation:

'Irene Dunsmuir told me that at one stage, George got work as a road man on the island of Rousay. “He had to take the work,” she told me, “or his benefit would have been stopped. He told me how he enjoyed the view, looking over to Eynhallow.”
           I love it! I treasure the image of the frail but thrawn poet, dressed in workman’s gear, leaning on his shovel and looking wistfully out to the holy island of Eynhallow, the place of the monks. George Brown’s career as a labourer was a short one.'

In his early poem, The Storm, which clearly shows the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins, GMB imagines a fisherman wrecked on the shore of Eynhallow:

... Rousay before me, the stout mast

Snapped, billowing down helpless sail.

               What evil joy the storm

               Seized us! plunged and spun!

And flung us, skiff and man (wave-crossed, God-lost)

On a rasp of rock! ... The shore breakers,

               Stained chancel lights,

               Cluster of mellow bells,

Crossed hands, scent of holy water ...

The storm danced over all that night,

               Loud with demons, but I

               Safe in Brother Colm's cell.

Next morning in tranced sunshine

The corn lay squashed on every hill;

               Tang and tern were strewn

               Among the highest pastures.

I tell you this my son: after

That Godsent storm, I find peace here

               These many years with

               The Gray Monks of Eynhallow.

You can read this poem and all of his others in The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, edited by Archie Bevan and Brian Murray.

It was possible, last night, to imagine the Gray Monks of Eynhallow, setting candle stubs in narrow windows and looking out on the wild stretch of sea between them and the Evie coast.

After a difficult but fascinating tramp round the island, negotiating the storm of terns again, we made it back to the boat.

I'd love to go again sometime - and stay longer ...

 

THE STONE BLOGS #1: Throughs, Covers, Hearting & Rags

Two weeks ago I went on a dry-stane dyke course. Why? you may ask! Well, I have recently moved into a new wooden house with a lot of stone on the site and I would like to use it to build some dykes. The photograph above is of a section of a dyke that I, along with five others, had a hand in repairing.

The craft of dry-stane dyking has a language all its own: foundations, builders, hearting, throughs, covers and rags; all the kinds of stone used in the construction of a dyke. And you have to get the batter right and make sure the stone you use presents a bonny face to the world.

This cross-section diagram has different names from the Orkney ones we were given by Brian of Orkney Training Group. 'Filling stones' just doesn't have the same resonance as 'hearting'; and 'rags' is more interesting than the more common 'coping stones'.

The dyke we repaired was at the Bu in Orphir. It had suffered through various phenomena: kye shouldering it down; the angle not being right, so that one side pushed the other over; and likely frost, rain and wind had played their part too. But it may well have stood for a couple of hundred years: it is said that many of Orkney's dry stone dykes were constructed by sailors from the time of the Napoleonic Wars during the longueurs between battles.

Robert Frost knew all about dry stone dykes too and their significance in the affairs of people living close to one another; though his stones - some are loaves and some so nearly balls/ We have to use a spell to make them balance - are somewhat different from the Orkney stone that falls so obligingly into flat grey slabs.

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, 
And spills the upper boulders in the sun, 
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. 
The work of hunters is another thing: 
I have come after them and made repair 
Where they have left not one stone on a stone, 
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, 
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, 
No one has seen them made or heard them made, 
But at spring mending-time we find them there. 
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill; 
And on a day we meet to walk the line 
And set the wall between us once again. 
We keep the wall between us as we go. 
To each the boulders that have fallen to each. 
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls 
We have to use a spell to make them balance: 
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!' 
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 
Oh, just another kind of out-door game, 
One on a side. It comes to little more: 
There where it is we do not need the wall: 
He is all pine and I am apple orchard. 
My apple trees will never get across 
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'. 
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder 
If I could put a notion in his head: 
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it 
Where there are cows? 
But here there are no cows. 
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know 
What I was walling in or walling out, 
And to whom I was like to give offence. 
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him, 
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather 
He said it for himself. I see him there 
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top 
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. 
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~ 
Not of woods only and the shade of trees. 
He will not go behind his father's saying, 
And he likes having thought of it so well 
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Robert Frost

Watch this space in blogs to come for news of some dry stane dykes that predate the Napoleonic wars by a couple of Millennia. And we will return to the Bu in Orphir as well, to its Viking history.

A Chance Encounter with Keith Allardyce

From Found, photo by Keith Allardyce of Douglas Hollick in Stronsay

I was outside my newly built house talking on my mobile phone to the builder, when an unfamiliar character wandered up the path, rucksack slung over one shoulder.

Had the pile of stones at the side of the house once been part of an old dwelling? No, they had been the ruined remains of a mill and byre and had been attached to the kiln which still stands there.

Why did he ask? 

The Kiln and Remains of the Mill and Byre by Maggie Miller

There then followed one of those serendipitous moments that have happened so frequently during this residency. The stranger with the backpack was Keith Allardyce who took the photographs for some lovely books about Orkney. The one above is of Douglas Hollick holding part of a block and tackle in Stronsay and comes from Found: Beachcombing in Orkney.

This time Keith is travelling round Orkney photographing ruined and abandoned houses. Was there one in the neighbourhood with a tree growing out of it? Not that I knew of, but I am new to the area. 

I put down my car keys - I was about to travel in to Kirkwall to the library for work - and invited Keith in for a cup of coffee.


I knew about Keith's earlier book, Seahaven: Stromness in the Orkney Islands, a collection of stunning photos of the people and places of Stromness, with words by Bryce Wilson. I particularly like the elegant photograph of Gunnie Moberg, sitting on her desk in her studio and the unmistakeable figure of Ian MacInnes, at work on a painting in Thistlebank. 





What I didn't know was that he had produced an earlier book about the disappearing way of life of Scotland's lighthouse keepers, At Scotland's Edge and a sequel, Scotland's Edge Revisited. This arose out of his time as a travelling keeper himself. He was 'third man,' he told me, on Suleskerry, the Pentland Skerries and Copinsay, all Stevenson Lighthouses, 'always the third man on the rock stations.' North Ronaldsay was a family station and there he would be fourth or fifth man. I wish I'd asked him what the differing duties were of the first, second, third, fourth and fifth men! Hard to imagine that much employment happening on stations now completely unmanned.

Keith lives on the Northumberland coast near Alnwick and runs holidays there for people with learning disabilities from the Camphill Village Trust.

But he has had a connection with Orkney stretching back to the seventies when he worked for the RSPB and lived in a cottage in Evie. He returns to the islands when he can and photographs aspects of island life he finds interesting. 

Thinking about it, all his projects have something of an elegiac air, trying to capture experience, character, place as they change and disappear. His fine books can be borrowed from Orkney Library & Archive.

I wish him luck with his latest venture, whatever it may turn out to be.