At The Hop

On By Mick CanningIn farming, hops, kent, tradition21 Comments

I was talking about hop pockets and pokes last week – and pigs, of course, which was how it all started, but forget the pigs for now. Let’s stick with the pokes and pockets. At the weekend we went for a walk through a part of Kent we hadn’t walked for a few years and part of the walk took us through this field:

This was a hop garden many years ago. Conveniently close to the oast houses so that as soon as the hops were picked they could be taken in and dried before there was any chance of them spoiling. Taken in bagged up in pokes, and once dried shipped out to the brewers in pockets. A word of explanation for those not familiar with these terms: hops are not grown in fields, they are grown in gardens. Not like your or my back garden, but like a field. But a field full of poles. Hop poles. With huge cable-like wires strung between them to support the hop bines as they grow.

When they are ready for harvesting, the bines are pulled down and the hops picked and put in pokes – large sacks (but you knew that, of course. You remembered it from last week). Then once dried they are shovelled into pockets – another size of sack.

And what are the hops for? Making beer, my friend. Lovely beer.

I don’t have a picture of the hop garden from back then, but late one cold, misty, autumn night about thirty years ago, I walked through it and the eeriness was instantly imprinted on me and once I was home I felt compelled to make an oil pastel painting of it (below).

Anyway, as I said I don’t have a photo of the hop garden in question, but this one from Pixabay illustrates very nicely the hop poles and wires with the growing hop bines growing up and across them:

Image by -Rita-👩‍🍳 und 📷 mit ❤ from Pixabay

The poles were supported by wires kept under tension, anchored into the ground around the edge of the garden. Quite a few of these are still in situ around the very edge of the field and just into the woodland and hedgerows bordering it.

In 1872, there were 72,000 acres of land in England growing hops, the majority of these being in Kent, employing over 100,000 seasonal workers at picking time. By 2003, the acreage in Kent was down to just over 1,000 and for the first time ever the county had been overtaken by Herefordshire, which now grew more, although the decline does at least appear to have halted for now. In 2011 there were a total of just over 2,500 acres under cultivation in England but it is such a small number there were fears the industry could die out. Although hops are still used in beer brewing, much of the requirement is imported, especially with a popular shift towards less bitter-tasting beers. But in much the same way that Kent has also lost a huge percentage of its apple orchards, a once rich and diverse farming landscape has become more and more homogenised, with endless huge fields of arable crops and sheep and cattle replacing the hop bines and apple trees.

I spent one autumn apple picking around thirty years ago and the farm I was working on had a large acreage of hop gardens (both apples and hops all sadly gone, now). It was an incredibly busy and bustling time, with our diverse group apple picking – a mixture of locals and Europeans come over for the work – and a traditional mix of workers in the hop gardens; as well as locals, there were a lot of gypsies and possibly still a few people down from London’s East End, which was a traditional way for those workers to make some extra money in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was busy, noisy, very hard work, and a lot of fun.

And, not surprisingly, there are a number of traditional songs about hop picking. So here is the wonderful Shirley Collins and the Albion Dance Band to perform ‘Hopping down in Kent’ especially for you.

A Pig In A Pocket

On By Mick CanningIn etymology, language, nursery rhymes, words26 Comments

Most people know the meaning of the saying to buy a pig in a poke, of course. It means to buy something without first checking you’re getting what you think you’re paying for. And where does the saying originate? Again, most people can tell you it comes from a few hundred years ago – actually the Middle Ages – when a buyer at a market might be offered a piglet in a sack and if they were foolish enough to buy it without first checking the contents, were likely to find later that the sack contained only a cat, although why it didn’t make a fuss and let people know it was a cat, and a cat that really didn’t want to be in this dratted sack, no one is saying.

(And was it actually a live cat or a dead one? Over to schrodinger for that one…)

If the buyer was wise enough to check, and opened the bag to see what was within, they would then be letting the cat out of the bag.

So, what is a ‘poke’, then? Let’s take the long route to this one, the scenic route… Go back a couple of hundred years when pockets weren’t something let into our clothes, but were more like cloth bags tied around the waist. A kind of medieval bumbag, if you will. Or just a bag on a piece of string tied around the waist if you won’t. This is why in the nursery rhyme we learn that:

‘Lucy Lockett lost her pocket,

Kitty Fisher found it;

Nothing in it, nothing in it,

But the binding round it.‘

which sounds very odd if you think only of what we understand as pockets nowadays and must confuse huge numbers of children when they hear it.

But the point is that the pocket was a bag, which in French is ‘poche‘ and from which comes the old English word for a large bag, a sack, which is ‘poke‘, with pocket being a diminutive of that: poke-et.

So, let’s back up there. A poke is a large bag, a sack. As mentioned above, I’ve seen dictionaries citing ‘poche‘ as the origin of the word, but a favourite source of mine, a Victorian dictionary of Sussex dialect, when discussing the saying cites the original Anglo Saxon word Pocca, meaning a pouch.

They’re probably both right.

But just to add a little more weight to all this, when hops are picked (at least in Kent and Sussex) they are first measured by the tallyman into a poke (yes, a large sack), then taken to an oast house where they are dried, after which they are shovelled into a hop pocket (a different sized sack) before being taken off for sale to the brewer.

To make lots of lovely beer!

Red Herrings

On By Mick CanningIn crime, culture, detective stories, etymology, language, Red herrings27 Comments

I had a couple of conversations the other day on detective novels, in which red herrings were mentioned, and it reminded me of something I had been reading a few days before, as well as one verse of an old nursery rhyme, the words recorded in the 1800’s, which goes thus:

The man in the wilderness asked of me
How many strawberries grew in the sea.
I answered him, as I thought good,
As many as red herrings grew in the wood.

Pixabay image

It is supposedly one of the lesser-known nursery rhymes, but I came across it in one of the books my children had when they were small. Possibly, the Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. Again, there is an old song occurring along the English east coast called the Red Herring, of which these are the first two verses:

1
What shall we do with the red herring’s head?
Oh, we’ll make that into feather beds, and all such things,
We’ve red herrings and heads and feather beds, and all such things.

Chorus
Of all the fish that swim in the sea, red herring it is the fish for me,
And all such things.

2
What shall we do with the red herring’s eyes?
Oh, we’ll make ’em into puddings and pies, and all such things,
We’ve red herrings and eyes and puddings and pies,
Red herrings and heads and feather beds, and all such things.

There seem to be many versions of this, one of which was collected by Cecil Sharp, well-known as one of the first people to travel around England in the early 1900’s collecting and writing down folk songs, afraid they would become lost as, in a rapidly modernising world, fewer and fewer people now sang them.

Unusually (because I never trust it as a source) I looked at Wikipedia which merely defined a red herring as a distraction, or something misleading. It suggests the term came from a strong smelling smoked kipper which could be dragged across a track to put hounds off of a scent.

And what it reminded me of was that a dictionary of the Sussex Dialect, published in 1875 does not have a particular entry for red herring, yet under ‘White-Herring’ is found the definition: A fresh herring, as distinguished from a dried one, which is called a red-herring. Delving a little deeper, we find references to dried, smoked, herrings – named red herrings – in use to mask the scent of trails both literally and figuratively, in a story published by William Cobbett in 1807 and also a couple of references from the 1780’s. There is apparently a bit of disagreement over where the phrase was used first in that context, but that doesn’t seem relevant here, it’s just interesting to find out that red herrings actually exist, and how they came to assume the role they have in literature and everyday conversation.

The Hooden Horse

On By Mick CanningIn animal guising, culture, customs, Folk traditions, history, Hooden Horse, Hoodening, kent16 Comments

In the town I used to live in, there was once a pub called the Hooden Horse, sadly now renamed to something much less interesting. I was reminded of this at an exhibition at Maidstone museum on Hooden Horses. Hooden Horses? Well, briefly…

Hoodening is a rural folk tradition unique to East Kent, England. Going back a few hundred years, in the week or so running up to Christmas, groups of farm labourers would dress up as various characters and go from door to door requesting money, cake and beer. One of the characters would be the Hooden Horse, which was an artificial horse’s head made of wood, with a jaw operated by string, on a wooden pole, held by one of the performers with his body covered in cloth – usually sacking. A sort of play was then performed in rhyme, a mixture of plot and satire, usually featuring a few local characters who would be well known to the watchers and might be the butt of jokes and scorn, as well as stock characters such as Molly, a waggoner, and the Mayor. And of course the horse (him)self, invariably called Dobbin. There would also be music performed on whatever might be available – accordions, fiddles, drums or whistles.

The relationship to Morris dancing and Mummers is hard to avoid and, like these traditions, has been revived in modern times by enthusiastic traditionalists.

A photo from the early twentieth century

A modern Hooden Horse

Another early twentieth century photo.

There are many other traditions in Britain involving what is known as ‘animal guising’, where men or women take the guise of an animal, the Padstow ‘obby ‘oss being perhaps the best known of these. The performance on May Day in Padstow, Cornwall, invariably draws large crowds.

On the left, a Hooden horse, and on the right a Mari Lwyd, the ‘skull horse’ of Welsh tradition. Although unconnected (as far as I know) the Welsh had a similar tradition, also taking place around Christmas and New Year. Skull horses are to be found in other parts of England, however, including Yorkshire.

Stag guising is another old tradition – possibly older than horse guising. It was certainly in existence during medieval times and survives today in the form of the Abbots Bromley Horn dancers, Staffordshire, who perform carrying reindeer antlers on poles on the Monday following ‘Wakes Sunday’ in September. Wakes Week became a tradition in industrial Northern England when factories and mills closed down for a week for maintenance giving the workers a holiday. This began in the early nineteenth century, but before this the ritual presumably took place at a different time of year.

The exhibition is on until 17th July 2023 and there is a link to their site here.

Shorelarking at Rye

On By Mick CanningIn larking, sussex, walking28 Comments

We went down to Rye harbour in Sussex, a few weeks ago, on a beautifully sunny but bitingly cold day. The actual harbour entrance is in the middle distance of the above photo with Dungeness Power Station just visible on the horizon in the distance.

This red-roofed hut sits on the shingle on the approach to the harbour and has become the iconic image that everyone photographs. I resisted the temptation this time, but took this one a few years ago. No one seems certain when it was built, but it was certainly in use from the early 1900’s onwards and was used to store fishing equipment.

The salt marshes behind the harbour constitute a nature reserve and are an important place especially for migrating birds. We walked around the marshes for an hour or so and did see quite a few birds, especially when we spent some while in a hide with the binoculars we’d brought. No close-up photos, because we were too far from the birds and I only had my pocket camera that day, but especially noticeable was was a group of some forty to fifty cormorants.

One of the tasks of the Environment Agency here is to continually move shingle in trucks westwards along the coast to shore up (pun intended) the sea defences. Due to the prevailing winds, longshore drift continually moves shingle eastwards along the coast and without this intervention it would choke the harbour mouth and undermine the sea wall at Pett (to the west). They load up the trucks with shingle from the shore, the trucks drive west and tip it out on the shore. The sea washes it eastwards along the coast again. The trucks load up with shingle from the shore…It almost feels a pointless exercise, but I suppose there’s no real alternative.

But longshore drift means that the shorelark on the South coast of England has a chance of finding rocks and stones (and all sorts of other things) that originated further to the west, and we spent some while searching among the stones here to see what we might turn up.

Shorelarking? It’s like mudlarking, but on the seashore. ‘Larking’ in this sense means looking for…well, anything. Coins, interesting rocks, anything lost or old or, preferably, both. Not that we found much, not that we ever find much, but we don’t do it as seriously as some folk. And as nice as it would be to turn up the sort of finds some people find in the mud of the Thames, we’re not that dedicated. But in the past I have found bits of flint tool while fieldlarking, and usually come home from a walk with an interesting stone or two.

We did find a couple of interesting things that day – they don’t look much, do they? But the grey stone in the centre is possibly a Mesolithic hammer stone, used for shaping flint tools while the nail had a tiny piece of wood still attached, but this crumbled away as soon as I picked it up. How old is it? I’ve no idea. Nails like that were in use from the 1800’s through into the 1900’s but it’s impossible to pin it down further. My immediate thought was it could be part of the beach groyne, but when I looked they seem to be constructed entirely with rivets. Maybe it is from an old shipwreck. The rock at the bottom is simply a lump of sandstone from further west along the coast, a piece of what was called Hastings Sandstone when I studied geology, but now known as the Ashdown beds. Nothing special, again.

Just an interesting few finds on the beach on a cold sunny day before we headed off for a warm drink.

Unhalfbricking

On By Mick CanningIn Fairport Convention, Folk Rock, music, Unhalfbricking16 Comments

I’ve never written an album review on here before, although I have reviewed a couple of concerts I’ve been to, so this is a first.

And if you have absolutely no interest in folk or folk-rock feel free to give this post a miss.

So, probably just one of you left. Let’s go.

Actually, now I’ve written the thing, it’s not really a review at all. It’s a bit of musical history, if anything. That wasn’t exactly what I’d planned.

Oh well…

Unhalfbricking is not my favourite Fairport Convention album, but it is an extremely important one. Which is not to say I don’t like it, because I do. It was released in 1969 and is their third album.

It is the following album, though, Liege and lief, which is rightly regarded as their most important, and an album that has had a huge influence on the direction folk and folk rock music has taken since its release, but Liege and lief came about as a result both of a tragedy and a new direction partly forced on the band by musical events way over the other side of the Atlantic. After the release of Unhalfbricking, most of the band were involved in a serious road accident (singer Sandy Denny was in a separate vehicle) which led to the hospitalisation of some members and, sadly, the death of both drummer Martin Lamble and the girlfriend of guitarist Richard Thompson.

After discussing whether they would continue as a group or just disband, the decision was made to continue and they hired a new drummer, the amazingly talented Dave Mattacks, and persuaded fiddle player Dave Swarbrick, who had guested on Unhalfbricking, to join the band on a permanent basis. And the decision was also made to change musical direction. Much of the material on their previous albums had been either American in origin – there were Three Bob Dylan covers on Unhalfbricking alone, for example – or country-tinged.

There is one track in particular on Unhalfbricking that helped to lead the band into their new direction, the traditional song A Sailor’s Life, which breaks new musical ground in this recording. What makes the track most memorable is that it is the first time a drumkit had ever been used on a traditional English folk song. It was also the first time Dave Swarbrick had used electric amplification, coming from a background with traditional folk groups. And then the whole track was apparently improvised on the first take, the first time the band had played it together, and listening to it, it is remarkable how you can hear them growing in confidence throughout the performance. And it is a long track, which I suspect has more than a little to do with the musicians getting the feel of working together and seeing what could be done with the material. Experimenting as they go along. Nothing like it had been released before.

Over in America, The Band, who had supported Bob Dylan on tour, had recorded Music from Big Pink in what has been called a reconnection with rural Americana, and listening to this there was a realisation both that by covering American standards Fairport would never be more than just one more wannabe Byrds cover band, but also that they wanted to take a similar direction with traditional British music. Bass player Ashley Hutchings had become deeply interested in the genre and Swarbrick came from a folk heritage. Thus A Sailor’s Life became a bit of a template for what was to come.

Finally, here’s a link to the song on YouTube.

Connections

On By Mick CanningIn family history, genealogy, research40 Comments

Through researching my family tree, I’ve discovered some new connections to the land.

It’s not just that I’ve found ancestors in new parts of the country, although that certainly has a bearing on things, it’s more that I have a reinforced sense of a long personal connection to the land, this land, where my ancestors spent their entire lives living and working. A connection so many of us seem to have lost these days. I’m following the threads of folk who scraped a living in villages in Norfolk or Essex or Hampshire, frequently living in poverty or at the very least on the very edges of it. A hard life for most of them. Widows with no way of supporting themselves other than plaiting ‘straw dollies’ for a few pence, labourers in their seventies still having to endure hard physical graft to stay out of the workhouse (where they would have had to work even harder, for even less reward). People for whom starvation would have been a very real threat. Even comparatively healthy families would have relied on all the womenfolk trying to bring a few extra pennies into the household.

Some of these connections are selective – I can reject a connection I’m uncomfortable with, such as through industrial work in towns or cities which is something I have little experience of, and no love of in the first place, but I cannot claim a connection that isn’t there in the first place.

And within this experience, there is the time element – both how long ago these events were, but also how long they lasted, which contributes to the intensity of this connection for me.

These folk weren’t just the very poorest, of course. Amongst my ancestors there are also a wide range of craftsmen and women such as weavers, shoemakers, and printers, but also other poor labourers such as shop assistants, launderesses, servants, stokers, coal porters, cable hands…the list goes on and on. Not that there’s anything special about my family tree – everyone has these folk in their past.

I think – I know – some people just look for royalty or knights in armour when they research their trees. They dream of having the right to a coat of arms, or bragging rights to a famous name. None of us come into it completely open to what we find. We all have some expectations – to push our ‘lines’ back as far as we can, for example, or discover connections to the famous. Personally, I’m delighted to find my ancestors were the urban and rural poor. I don’t want to find the rich and privileged in my tree. Is that inverse snobbery? Perhaps.

But it’s the connection to the land I’m referring to here. I’ve always felt a strong personal connection to the land, to the physical world, and every census entry or marriage certificate I come across showing my ancestors earning their living that way seems to strengthen my own connections as well as a sense of continuity with my forebears.

Qutb Minar

On By Mick CanningIn Delhi, India, Qutb Minar, travel44 Comments

Two or three weeks ago I read Rama Arya’s blog on Qutb Minar and I remarked then that Qutb Minar is probably my favourite place in Delhi and decided I ought to put up a couple of my own pictures, too. It seems to have taken me rather longer to get around to it than I had intended, but here ’tis.

Qutb refers to the whole of the complex, including the tower and several other important buildings. The Qutb Minar itself is a red and orange sandstone tower 72.5m tall. It has a diameter of just over 14m at its base, and just under 3m at the top, and is the tallest tower in India.

A little context: The first of the Moslem invasions of India was by Muhammed, Sultan of Ghur in what is now Afghanistan, in 1192. Is that not wondrous? I’d love to live in a place called Grrr. Having overrun a large part of the Northern Indian plains, he returned to Ghur, leaving his new territory in the hands of his army commander and favourite slave, Qutbuddin Aibak. Qutbuddin decided to leave a monument to his religion that was designed to overawe his new subjects and inspire his own people, and set about building a mosque with a massive tower nearby.

And this is a squinch in Iltutmish’s Tomb. Is not a squinch a wondrous thing also, both in its construct and its name? A squinch is a ‘bridging’ structure, used here to support a dome (now gone). Iltutmish was Shamsuddin Iltutmish (ruled 1211-1236), 3rd ruler of Delhi (after Qutbuddin and Aram).

This is the famous ‘non-rusting’ iron pillar. This stands in the courtyard of the mosque and was here long before the mosque was built. It was made in the reign of Chandragupta II (AD 375-413), is composed of almost pure iron (99.72%) and shows only the slightest sign of rusting. A sanskrit inscription on the pillar indicates that it probably stood originally outside a Vishnu temple, possibly in Bihar, and was moved later to this site. It would probably have had a garuda, the vehicle of Vishna, on the top. 

A close-up of the inscription.

Decorative details of the stonework. Most artistic decoration is, as usual with Islamic craftwork, patterned work and verses from the Koran. At Qutb Minar, there are also plentiful stylised, and sometimes surprisingly realistic, depictions of plants with flowers and buds and long, winding stems and tendrils. To construct the mosque, artisans used stone from Hindu and Jain temples and many stones and panels still depict the original carvings, frequently defaced but still recognisable.

Brahminical motifs on the columns of the Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque. These pillars were originally part of the Hindu and Jain temples destroyed in the area when Qutbuddin built his capital. It is recorded that twenty seven temples were destroyed. They would have been reassembled by Hindu craftsmen, Qutbuddin using local labour.

Another view of the columns on one of the cloisters surrounding the Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque.

NOTE: My faithful follower might recognise some of these notes and photos, as this is a rehash of part of a post I wrote on Delhi several years ago. I think it’s worth revisiting, since it’s such a wonderful place.

Excerpts From The Book of Meh

On By Mick CanningIn cats, humour, Religion, satire26 Comments

From Chapter one:

In the beginning there was lots of very dark darkness and very cold cold stuff, which wasn’t at all nice and although no one existed yet, they were all really miserable.

And Meh, the god of this world, thought ‘Well, this isn’t much fun’ and so He created the universe, with the Milky Way above and the Place of Torment below. And the Milky Way is a beauteous place of flowing streams of milk and cream and comfortable sofas beside cosy fires, while the Place of Torment is a cold and frozen place of hard floors and empty food bowls. And that was the first day, and a jolly good first day’s work it was too.

On the second day, Meh created the earth by vomiting up a giant hairball, and then sat back as life rapidly evolved without any further input from Meh, which was how He liked it, so He could curl up and take a little nap…

From Chapter three:

‘And thou shalt make images of Meh, and cause them to be distributed, yeah, all over the internet and into the world even unto the furthest corners. There shall be infinitely more of these images than those of dogs, for I, Meh, am a jealous god.

‘And be it known my chosen ones, whom I love and have created in my own image, shall be afforded a privileged place in thine homes, otherwise I shall visit plagues upon thy households, yeah, even unto the seventh generation of thy accursed species.

‘But those who treat my beloved offspring well shall have their eternal reward, most especially in the Milky Way, while those who mistreat them shall be condemned to be pounced upon and bitten for all eternity, and great will be the wailing and gnashing of teeth.’

From Chapter seven:

And know that this is the truth, for it is written herein and thou shalt believe it for it is the word of Meh.

It is told there was a Man of Meh, and he came unto the land of Babylon to preach to the people there tolerance and goodwill to all those that walk upon four legs and are furry and purr when pleased, yet the people received him with hostility and drove him out into the desert.

And thus Meh said ‘Lo, I shall send plagues to irritate and annoy these godless people until they learn the error of their ways.’ There was first, then, a plague of fleas, which certainly irritated them, although it was insufficient to cause them to mend their ways. So Meh then turned the milk sour, and this annoyed the people, but they still denied Meh and said ‘We don’t want to listen to some preacher spouting a load of old bollox’ and so Meh then caused all the fish in the fish market to be a bit off, and not really smell all that good. And the people said ‘Oh, leave it out. We’ll make our own rules and laws.’

So Meh did withdraw from the world, and he did sulk a goodly while.

Review of Shadowlands by Matthew Green

On By Mick CanningIn books, Matthew Green, Non fiction, Review, Shadowlands, UK, writing14 Comments

In this book Matthew Green charts the decline and eventual abandonment of eight British settlements; a diverse selection ranging from the Stone Age settlement of Skara Brae in the Orkneys, through several Medieval villages and cities and up to the twentieth century, to an area emptied of its inhabitants during the Second World War and a village that was abandoned when the valley it inhabited was flooded to create a reservoir – although in that case ‘abandoned’ is the wrong word, since that particular story is a harrowing tale of folk driven from their homes at the diktat of decision makers far away, not even of their own country.

In each chapter he tells the story of the decline of the settlement drawing upon written records for all but the oldest, Skara Brae, for which he relies upon archaeological evidence, and some of the more recent, for which he uses a mixture of eye-witness accounts and the testimonies of those who had heard their stories at first hand. Of all the stories here, that of Dunwich is probably the most famous, with its myths of bells from long-drowned churches being heard far out under the waves, although the popular description of Dunwich as a ‘drowned city’ is inaccurate, as it fell away into the sea as the cliffs beneath it were eroded away. But much is known of Dunwich, with many extant records and maps of the city, enabling Matthew to chart its decline and eventual end in some detail.

Hirta is the biggest island of the St Kilda archipelago and was occupied for at least two thousand years until 1930, when the final thirty six islanders voted to leave. By then, most of the families and younger residents had left for the mainland, and their traditional way of life had become unsustainable. Until a couple of hundred years ago the islanders were virtually cut off from the rest of Scotland, due to the distance and the difficulty of making a landing at the island. Existing almost exclusively on a diet of seabirds (remarkably, they were apparently lousy fishermen!), the islanders lived a remarkably difficult life and it is no surprise that as they were exposed more and more to the outside world, more and more of the islanders opted to leave for a better life.

I found I was drawn deep into these stories not just because I found them so fascinating, but also because of Matthew’s skilful and easy style. A very well researched and beautifully presented book, I’d definitely give it five stars out of five.