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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in scotland

Posted by on in Studies Blogs
National Unicorn Day

unicorn shield edIn Scotland it is National Unicorn Day, the day they celebrate the national beast. With the lockdown and everyone staying indoors, they have become plentiful again, so I hear. Thus from medieval Scots history I offer you a tale told by a unicorn (on good authority!) from The Talis of Fyve Bestes (beasts that is, not besties). The executive summary:

“The Unicornis Tale” recounts how, in his youth, a boy named Gundulfus threw a stone and broke a cockerel’s thigh bone. He leaves home to study and returns on the night before he is due to travel to Kent to receive a benefice. His family and friends convince him to stay rather than travel that night, promising that the cock’s crows will wake him in the morning. The cock refuses to crow as an act of revenge and Gundulfus loses his position.

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Posted by on in Studies Blogs
Hogmanay

Tonight Hogmanay celebrations in Edinburgh will end with an impressive fireworks display. Thousands will be gathered there to see in the New Year -- many more will be at home watching it on the telly because we're introverts and that's the way we like it.

Historic Environment Scotland has done some research into when fireworks were first displayed in Scotland. Few will be surprised to find that 'Renaissance King' James IV (r 1488-1513) was responsible. He sponsored poets and alchemists and other scholars, but he liked a party as well as the next royal. The occasion was not New Years, however:

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
A Keening for Myself

A Keening for Myself

Slowly I find myself leaving. I take last walks to say goodbye to certain places which is a ritual I carried out all my life. I am woven together with threads of this place, my body holds her water and blood and my bones are made from her bedrock. Then slowly, without any movement, I shift between places. One foot is here while the other has crossed the ocean onto another continent. I am back to encompassing both worlds. Leaving is painful. It’s not muted by knowing I can return at any time. It’s an awareness which brings into focus the pain of those who left and knew they’d never return. Violently uprooted and ripped from the land. To be born of generations upon generations who lived and died on this soil to then be cleared away, eradicated as if they were vermin, swept aside to make way for the more profitable sheep.  

 

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
“Wise Woman’ By Jane Brideson. 
Used with permission

She sits on the windowsill above my altar in a gold frame. The image is entitled ‘Wise Woman’ painted by Irish painter Jane Brideson entitled. The Wise Woman is sitting by her kitchen table burning something in a small copper cauldron from which the smoke swirls and wafts up and around her.

There are images in the smoke, a hare under a waxing moon, a croft with a thatched roof, smoke trailing out of the chimney. The cottage has two windows on its whitewashed front which I want to peer through, the paint of the front door is probably peeling in several places, to reveal a rainbow of colors which span decades. I imagine what it might look like inside, maybe like the Irish croft my Great Aunt Mary lived in, a wise woman herself who never married and worked the farm alone and traded for most of what she needed. The third swirl of smoke holds the scene of a cauldron pot over a fire, next to a large kettle.

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Keeper of the Memories by Lady Haight Ashton

I often see transparent gossamer threads emanating from each person, connecting us together and binding us and our ancestral traditions together. Our Akashic memories from the past form patterns for the future. 

 

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b2ap3_thumbnail_Louises-drawing.jpg

Portrait of me by author & artist Louise Hewitt. Louise entitled this piece “She Who Wears the Antlers’ not knowing that my name in the ‘real’ world is ‘She Who Wears Antlers’

 

The Old Antlered One

I am a product of the land I am from. If you were to cut me open you’d find that my bones are made from her compacted soil, my lungs carry her air and her rain and thunder still flow in my blood.

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Posted by on in Studies Blogs
May Observance

In his introduction the early Scots poet Gavin Douglas prefaces The Palis of Honoure by setting the scene in May. Getting ready to perform the observances of the season he wanders through 'a garding of plesance' -- that is, an enclosed garden. It is a joy to behold:

With Sole depaint, as Paradys amyable
And blisfull bewes with blomed variance

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