Burning Bushes and Wandering Stones

New Year's Day has so much superstition attached to it that it would fill a small book. Most of it is to do with ensuring good luck in the year ahead. 

Many people will be First Footing, visiting friends and neighbours and giving gifts. In Yorkshire they call the gift-giver the Lucky Bird that flits from house to house. On the Isle of Man they call them the Quaaltagh. In parts of Scotland they'll be quaffing a drink made from beer, whisky, eggs and sugar in a Het Pint Ceremony. In other places people will be queuing for the Cream of the Well - a drink from the first draw of a natural well or spring. Meanwhile, in various places around the UK, people will be Wassailing and performing Mumming Plays. 

In Putley, just outside Ledbury in Hereford and Worcester, their Wassail takes the form of Burning the Bush. Thirteen bonfires are lit just after Midnight - 12 of them arranged in a circle around a central, larger fire. They are lit using a blazing straw-stuffed hawthorn globe on the end of a long pole which is then thrown on to the central bonfire. While it burns, fresh hawthorn is cut and made into a second sphere which is doused with cider, and later singed in the dying embers of the main fire. The crowd chants 'Owd Ci-der!' nine times - the first two syllables are said at a normal pitch but the last, the '-der', is dropped to a low growl a full octave below the other notes. The luck-bringing globe is then taken away to hang in the kitchen at a local water mill until the next year's ceremony.

   

Wassailing generally takes place around Twelfth Night (5th-6th January) or Old Twelfth Night (17th). Will I be Wassailing my apple trees this year? Watch this space. 

But the oddest New Year's Day tradition that I've come across is the Wandering stone of Quoyboyne. At Birsay near the colourfully named town of Twatt on the Orkney Islands, a large rock known as the Stone of Quoyboyne allegedly nips to the Loch of Boardhouse as the Hogmanay bells ring out and goes for a quick dip. Meanwhile, on the nearby island of Rousay, a stone called Yetnasteen wanders down to Loch Scockness for a 'Ne'er Day drink'. To discourage people from checking the veracity of these stories, it is said that should you stumble upon either stone in mid-wander, you will die on the spot. 

Orkney has some amazing Neolithic stone sites as this video shows:

   

Incidentally, regarding the word 'Twat' as an insult, no one is entirely sure of its origin. It may share a common root with the place name in that it may derive from the Old English word thwāt, meaning a cut or valley, or the Old Norse thveit or þveit, which means a clearing in a wooded area or meadow (from which we also get the 'thwaite' in place names like Bassenthwaite and Thwaites Glacier). 

My favourite story about the word involves the poet Robert Browning who once famously misused the term in his 1841 poem Pippa Passes: 

Then owls and bats 

Cowls and twats 

Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods 

Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry. 

When Frederick J Furnivall wrote to ask Browning what he meant by 'twat', Browning replied that as a youth he had encountered the word in a volume of broadsides and inferred it to be an item of nun's clothing akin to a wimple. 

He must have been mortified to discover the truth. 

Happy New Year!