A Green Man Review

Dear Anna,

As you well know, I, unlike you, was schooled in the university of the land. I don’t regret it but it was a very good thing that I apprenticed to Macpherson, the Head Gardener before me, as the man knew more about botany than anyone save a hedge witch. And he knew one of those, too, so she filled in on my education where he couldn’t.

Scots are an odd bunch — even when they were strongly Christian, they believed deeply in hedge witches. Oh they might have called them healers, they might have called them herbalists, but they were hedge witches. Almost all were women, though a few down the centuries were men.

The particular hedge witch Angus had me work with was Lisbeth ab Owain Gwynedd, a lady who had been given a cottage on the Estate many decades ago. She helped Angus keep the animals and humans here healthy. She rarely went off the Estate, but that wasn’t unusual, given that we operate pretty much as a self-sufficient affair. She certainly didn’t need to leave the Estate for any of her needed botanicals, as she claimed only the plants that grew here would actually be beneficial.

Macpherson and ab Owain Gwynedd deeply believed in leylines, which they said ran across the entire Estate. They said that the best medicinal plants were found were the lines intersected, forming pools of geomantic energies. In her cottage was a map on sheep skin she said was many centuries old that showed all these lines.

Remember the circle of stones we found a few years back? They’re on the map as are several sacred springs and what ab Owain Gwynedd called fairy circles. Though there are superb mushrooms growing in the latter, no one harvests them.

Sadly ab Owain Gwynedd apparently passed on several decades back. No one knew how old she was but some claimed she was well over a hundred. Another hedge witch, Tamsin Sorenson, now occupies her cottage. The odd thing is that Tamsin attracts owls, lots of owls, with the woods around the cottage full during the day with them sleeping. But that’s another story for another time!

with affection Gus

The Coyotes was what they called themselves. They’d sent me a packet with the usual glowing look at themselves, a live CD, and, still fairly unusual, a DVD of the band performing. That’s when I noticed that they were an all-woman band. That in and of itself didn’t mean they were good, bad or just average, but we do try to book as many such bands as we can.

Like Big Bad Wolf, The Cadejos and Trickster’s Choice, who we’ve all booked over the years, it turned out that they were from the Southwestern USA, an area that’s had more than a few great bands that mixed music from the Celtic tradition with the accordion-centered music of the Tex-Mex tradition. It’s not quite the first sort of music, nor is it truly the second musical tradition either. Instead it’s a wild combination that merges the traditions together in some of the best music you’ll hear ever.

(I always meant to book The Mollys, another great band playing this music. They broke up messily when the two women in the band fought over matters I’ll leave to your imagination. It’s a matter that, like the unpublished Sandy Denny biography, that the less said of it, the safer for all involved!)

So I watched the DVD, enjoyed their music and their stage presence. They’d cut three recordings, two in the studio and recorded live in their home venue, a bar called charmingly Mojo Rising. So I emailed them, suggested some dates and offered a suggested fee for their being here a full week doing a concert and workshops as well. It was generous enough that I heard back from them within hours.

They arrived here with bags and instrument cases in hand, settled into the yurts they were staying in, and, since they had three days before their concert, joined in helping out the kitchen, working with Gus in the gardens, and being part of the Neverending Session. They were obviously having a great time.

Their concert was a resounding success but their workshops on various subjects ranging from playing the accordion in the Tex-Mex style to cooking New Mexican breakfast food (which won the heart and stomach of Reynard and many others) were well-attended and was what really got everyone excited. Need I note that they brought a large bag of chilies, dried and some smoked, with them? And other culinary goodies as well.

They were very happy with their time here as were we. We sent them off on their next leg on their European tour which I helped book using my contacts and said that they were welcome back again.

Now I’m headed off to the Kitchen as I can smell smoked chilies and peppers and garlic all the way up here in my office which means something Tex-Mex is being cooked!

The Neverending Session was off elsewhere one quiet night in the Pub recently and Finch was tending the bar, so I stepped outside to play a few tunes to clear my head after several hours of doing the Pub accounts. I like being the Publican but doing the business side of it can be bloody boring. Though I do look forward to busman’s holidays with my wife Ingrid, the Estate Purchasing Agent who’s also our Steward, when we go off looking for interesting spirits for the Pub!

So as I started to play ‘The Changeling Reel,’ someone moving in the shadows caught my eye. And he was, even at first look, not human, as his skin was all very small overlapping leaves, so dark that they looked almost black, and his hair was made of dark green moss. I’d have been surprised if I hadn’t encountered him, or a kin of his, in our incarnation of the Wild Wood sometime back.

I watched as he stepped into the light cast by a nearby window in the Pub and pulled a fiddle from, well, nowhere, as he or one of his kin had done decades back when we first met. A fiddle made of living wood, it seemed, with strings of ivy stirring of their own accord, as there was no wind ‘tall.

With a gleam in his golden eyes, he matched me note for note as we played that tune and several more before we nodded to each other and he faded back into the dark. I finished off by playing ‘Banish Misfortune’ and went back to the Pub.

While our Kinrowan Hall is justly famous for the music that keeps the old place resonating nicely, we’re also home to a fair number of our feline friends. While some of the cats just come and go (not unlike the notoriously peripatetic musicians of The Neverending Session), there are a select few who’ve taken up permanent residence, albeit sometimes in the cellar while the music’s going on, especially if there’s whistles.

Collectively they’re generally known simply as ‘the cats’ (original, huh?), but we figured that it was time to introduce them to you; it’s usually polite — and politic — to greet a cat by name (using his or her sensible, everyday name, or at the very least using ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’), and one often comes across one of our feline inhabitants in one nook or other around the Building.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, meet the moggies . . .

First up is Ysbaddaden (‘King of all Giants’ from the story of Culhwch & Olwen), who’s sometimes affectionately known as ‘Bad Daddy’ by the human staff. He’s the alpha tom of the place, and you mainly find him guarding the gardens, or stalking the great hall. He’s probably tortoiseshell, but it’s difficult to be entirely sure given the amount of ‘markings’ that he’s picked up over his long life of battles. Fiercely loyal and protective towards the other cats, he still packs a hell of a wallop and a frightening turn of speed for an old ‘un!

Didjan is a smaller-than-average tabby female, probably the runt of her litter. Something of an outsider, ‘Didjie’ somehow manages to thrive on any food scraps left unattended for more than a second by the others — and occasionally the inattentive human as well. She can generally be found in the windows of the kitchen passageways. Both feline and human rumours of her forming an unholy alliance with Maggie Pye are probably completely accurate. . . . (A ‘didjan’ is a morsel of food — the bit of pasty crust that the dirty fingers hold, left by Cornish tin miners to appease the ‘buccas’ in the ‘bal’ (mine).

Phynnoderee is a very sleek, black Manx tom cat. ‘Finn’ is of the ‘rumpy’ (no tail) rather than the ‘stumpy’ variety of Manx, and seems rather proud of the fact. He’s hugely popular with the she-cats (which may explain the high percentage of oddly-tailed kittens mewling around underfoot.) He can often be spotted in the Reading Room, on some high spot overlooking his domain.

Wattie mysteriously arrived as a kitten in the Green Man cellars, shortly after a touring Scots band (friends of Our Jack) stored their flight cases down there . . . Growing up to be quite burly, his indescribably long and shaggy ginger fur means that he’s sometimes known as ‘that orange brute.’ Wattie has claws like claymores, and pursues his favourite sport of ‘moosing’ in the storerooms with an intensity that borders on the psychopathic.

Maddy and June (aka The Silly Sisters), are two tabby females, very alike, and usually seen together. June is the slightly larger of the two and is distinguishable by the white patch below her neck. Maddy is probably the wilder-natured cat (and has been known to bear a few ginger kittens). One stumbles across them gamboling together wherever their fancy takes them.

Blodeuwedd is the youngest of the females. Denise found her by the Green Man entrance, hiding among the flowers (in a hanging basket, strangely), and invited her in for a saucer of milk. While ‘Blod’ co-exists quite happily with the other cats, she frequently seeks the company of humans in the offices of the building, and has the unnerving ability to magically appear on desks like a very sudden Cheshire Cat.

Maeve is a splendid and stately black and white female of indeterminate age; she’s at least as old as Ysbaddaden, who she’s clearly known from kittenhood. Largely sedate and inactive these days, and usually to be found on the velvet cushions of the second floor landing window seat where proper homage may be paid to her when one goes past, when Maeve does go for a stroll, she does so as queen of all that she surveys. Though well past breeding age, Maeve will still (when no ‘prying eyes’ of the younger cats are about) invite Ysbaddaden to assist her with her grooming.

Cats, underfoot and in unexpected places, skulking in the cellars, haunting the hems of the drapes, purring to themselves on sunny windowsills, licking each other’s ears before the fires, and, while you’re reading this edition of the Review, probably draping themselves over your reading material. It’s in their nature.

Gutmansdottir was her family name and the only name she went by. She said she was a botanist and was interested in studying our Wild Wood, the area of the Estate that’s  virtually unchanged for over a thousand-years, if not a lot longer. I was intrigued enough by the idea that I asked our Steward at the time, Jean-Pierre, if she could use one of the staff yurts and get her meals gratis for as long as she was here.

That was seven years ago. I don’t think either party realised how bloody big her endeavour was going to be. It’s gotten so long-term that she works for me part-time for what she needs for cash and spends much of the better weather when she wasn’t working for me out there, usually several days at a time. She said that it indeed looked like nothing had been touched there except for a few standing stones, possibly what could be barrow-mounds and one bloody big stone dragon which she’d like to know the story about.

She spent the first summer just cataloguing fungi and lichen, dozens that were thought gone in Scotland. That was followed by a winter of collecting scat as that she said told her a lot about the botany of an area as reflected in the diet of hares, owls and so forth. I assisted her in setting up precipitation meters which sent their data back to a central computer by radio. The Several Annies, Iain’s Library Apprentices, spent a winter skiing out there to map the terrain and look for any signs of habitation no matter how long ago. They didn’t find any. Or at least none that was of this world…

So her work continues. We built a new, much bigger yurt with enough shelving and storage for her notes, books, tools and of course botanical samples. Not to mention her scat collection. Will she ever be done? I doubt it. I’ve got a great worker and the Estate has a superb community member.

It was well past the witching hour on a night when a hard rain was beating against the windows in our Pub when the stranger started her story: ‘The Sandman is a far more dangerous, feral creature than modern folk think of him as being. The Sandman of old didn’t make children sleepy.  No, he gave them nightmares that harmed them deeply for years after they became adults.’

I asked why had The Sandman became a fairly harmless bogeyman. She reminded me and the other listeners that the original versions of the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm were full of incest, murder, and even cannibalism, but were watered down substantially by the Victorian Era translators who brought them first in the English language.

So The Sandman as she told the story was a creature cloaked in darkness who face is so hideous that it made children scream. He would get very close to them and whisper in a voice so low that only his victim, and yes they are his victims, could hear the awful things he said to them. Whatever it was that he said, it made children wake up screaming.

There is a much darker version of this tale that says that The Sandman was so hideous that his victims became blind literally from seeing him. Call it nightmare creature induced blindness. I hadn’t heard this version but it sounded plausible. It’s surely a scary idea.  She added that there was a rare variant of The Sandman myth that said he induced the fear in children so that he could be the last thing they saw before he tore their eyes out leaving them blind, and also so he could savour the salty tears of fear in their eyes as he ate them down like treats.

She drank deeply of her autumn ale and ended by saying ‘Pleasant dreams, everyone.’