Hawthorn
Sceach Gheal
Crataegus monogyna
Whitethorn, May Tree, Maybush
It’s late May. The land foams with it. The roads and fields edged in lace. Hawthorn in full bloom. Trees alone and ladened white as bridal chapels rooted in the middle of green fields. More ancient, more sacred still.
From my desk in Donegal, I can see one such fairy thorn from the window, low across the lake. A white cow is under it most of the day. The stuff mythology is made from. And hawthorn is steeped in that.
We drive past many more daily; trees left in the middle of fields, carefully farmed around. The superstition is rooted deep. Everyone knows Hawthorn belongs to the other crowd and it’s best to leave it well enough alone. Ask anyone from anywhere in rural Ireland and they’ll tell you a tale; some hawthorn uprooted, destroyed and the uncanny destruction that followed there-after.
I have one such tale. At some point in my childhood the farmer renting the fields behind our house decided to tear out all the hedging and fill in all the sheugh’s (ditches), he turned nine fields, each edged in willow and hawthorn into two, and piped and filled the waterways. In the top of these two huge new fields there was an old lone hawthorn, all the larger stones lifted from the field piled at its base, mossy with age. This too he pulled from the ground. At least he tried. The machinery broke down. He eventually got it out, had a bonfire and then the trouble really started. He planted potatoes in the field, they rotted in the ground. He tried again, but again they came up rotten. He then turned cattle into the field. The calves died. He left them there to rot. They smelt like hawthorn flowers. He is now banned from keeping livestock, and he’s never farmed the fields since. Allowing the grass to turn to meadow and the hedging to slowly seed its way back in. And there is now a hawthorn tree, alone in the middle of the field, just a few meters from where the original one was. The other crowd always win…
A more famous example of this tale is the story of DeLorean. The well-known Northern Irish car manufacturer brought in English workmen after locals refused to uproot the lone hawthorn blocking the building of a new but ill-fated factory. The owner’s disgrace and the subsequent failure of the company has since been blamed on the destruction of the tree.
The reverence for the Hawthorn still holds strong, indeed in modern Ireland an entire motorway was rerouted to protect a fairy tree. However, another fairy site was damaged in its construction, and someone cut all the limbs from the thorn. It survived but the motorway is now known as an accident black spot. As every Irish person will tell you quietly; that’s what happens when you mess with a fairy thorn.
The mixture of respect and fear for these trees can perhaps be attributed to their scent when in bloom. A compound called triethylamine is present in the scent of the flower when in full bloom, this compound is also present in the chemical make-up of the smell of rotting flesh. Hawthorn blossom literally smells of death, this is most likely why they are listed amongst the most unlucky flowers to bring indoors and why it was thought death would follow if brought inside. The superstition makes sense; our ancestors may not have known about bacteria, but they did recognise the smell and its attractiveness to flies. To bring it indoors is to bring in flies, which could indeed lead to illness and death. The fear of bringing it indoors is not then without practical foundation.
However, they are often found growing beside holy wells and so are easily imbued with the same reverence. Here they become wishing trees with rags and ribbons tied to them in order to appeal to the fairies or the spirit of the well.
Hawthorn flowers are often drunk as a tea or tincture to ease heartache. And the haws produced in autumn can be used to create a heart strengthening blend. Hawthorn is often referred to as apples and cheese, meaning the haws and leaves eaten in times when other food was scarce.
Hawthorn is not useful as a wood, but it is useful as a boundary, there are several superstitions about spirits being unable to cross hawthorn thorns and indeed for living humans and other large animals its sharp thorns make a foreboding boundary. In this vein I often weave hawthorn branches into a haw full wreath for our Samhain door.
But now it is May. The hawthorn is in flower, swathes of it across the country. We’re in Donegal to recover, my boy and I, from an illness that has knocked me for six. Where we are the veil is permanently thin. There is a sacred well at the top of the lane and I look out the window beyond that lone thorn tree towards Tory Island, and to the fairy hill where the old Irish sea god, Manannán Mac Lir is said to reside. The house smells of lilacs and at dusk a blackbird sits on the chimney and sings, it reverberates down the flue into the living room where I write. The leveret is getting big and now comes right up to the windows before calmly hoping off under the dog roses in full bloom.
We spend our days wandering through the forest to a standing stone by the sea or snuggled up telling stories. I make them up as we go, whatever my boy points to gets a tale, his judgement instantly pronounced on his little face. On the beach I stand on the sand, my feet in the water where the river meets the sea, I gather flowers and gather my boy in my arms. It is a wonderful and magical existence. And yet as we hear the cuckoo call beyond the garden and I smell the hawthorn in bloom on the breeze I cannot shake the summer, seventeen years ago now when my paternal grandmother died. Slowly, like these lingering sunsets, the cancer turning her bones as lacey as the hedges in bloom. When I first heard the cuckoo’s call, when I sat with her daily and brought armfuls of the garden inside for her to see. Today’s tale is a delicate dedication to that summer, inspired by hawthorn lore and perhaps, I hope, a heartsease for grief. It is also a snippet, a draft beginning of a longer tale which should form part of a collection I’m currently working on. Tales inspired by local folklore and set during more recent times. If you enjoy it, please let me know.
It’s May again. All the world is white with it. A tide of Hawthorn blooming in the hedgerows. All through the summer before it had tapped at the windows and doors. And slowly, so slowly no one noticed it laced its way around the house. Turning everything a murky grey. Its scent lingering in each and every room, long after the blooms had gone on the wind. Soon all the days looked the same and when she discovered the clocks had stopped, it was already too late. Time had grown so brittle nothing could be done.
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