Getting to the heart of tradition

It's also Plum Shuttle Eating Day and the time when the birds are said to begin mating. Signen cake is eaten in Cumberland and fishing nets are blessed in Northumberland.

For all sorts of reasons, therefore, it is a busy time with lots of things happening around the country, not to mention those famous and secretive greetings cards which are exchanged. But I doubt if many revellers give any thought to the man whose life is remembered today.

The snag is that there are 52 saints who bear the name of Valentine, many of them being forgotten or ignored with the passage of time, but in spite of all the stories, no-one is quite sure which of them is honoured by today's events.

However, various authorities have narrowed the options down to a possible two - but even they provide a puzzle.

It is known that a church was built on the Flaminian Way in Rome during the fourth century and it was dedicated to a martyr called St Valentine, whose feast day is February 14.

He was either a priest or a doctor, but he was beheaded in Rome during the persecutions by Claudius the Goth around AD 269. He was buried beside the Flaminian Way and his tomb became a place of pilgrimage.

However, there are accounts of another St Valentine, also a martyr, whose feast day also falls on February 14 and he was a bishop at Terni in Umbria.

This Valentine was also martyred in Rome by being beheaded during persecutions of the Catholic church and his remains were taken back to Terni, where he was buried. In AD 350, a church was built on the site of his grave.

There is just a possibility that these two martyrs could have been the same person, the confusion arising through different versions of the same story, but there is no way the truth can now be determined.

Neither of their life stories contains anything which might have produced the custom of selecting a partner on this day.

This long-established practice, now heavily commercialised, may have developed from the idea that birds select their partners today and yet another theory is that the Valentine's Day links with lovers originated in the distant past, even in pagan times.

Among the many customs practised on St Valentine's Day was one by love-sick girls. A girl had to take a hard-boiled egg, remove the yolk and fill the cavity with salt. Before going to bed, she had to eat the salty egg, after which she must neither talk nor drink before going to sleep. Having performed this ritual, it was believed she would dream of the man she would marry.

Another ritual was to plant one's beans. As the saying goes: "On St Valentine's Day, beans should be in the clay." One piece of advice when planting beans was to sow four times the number expected to reach maturity, hence the saying: "One to rot, one to grow, one for the pigeon and one for the crow."

While remembering that many birds could be selecting their partners around this time of year, we joined the RSPB's annual garden bird watch almost three weeks ago.

We selected an hour on the Sunday morning and settled down to observe the feathered visitors in our garden - and we had a few surprises. Among the numerous house sparrows which are a regular feature of our bird life, my wife noticed a single tree sparrow. Very similar in appearance to the house sparrow, the tree sparrow can be identified by its chestnut brown head and nape of the neck.

It was the only tree sparrow which ventured into our garden at that time and it was pleasing that it should choose to do so during that formal accounting period.

At normal times, we have been visited by a pair of siskins, but they chose not to pay us a call during the RSPB count. A solitary chaffinch did arrive, as did a pair of robins, but, strictly following the rules, we did not count a starling which appeared on our neighbour's television aerial, nor did we count a passing magpie or a collared dove sitting in a nearby tree.

We did record our usual blue tits, great tits and coal tits, as well as our regular greenfinches and a male blackbird, but just as our hour was drawing to a close, three goldfinches arrived and proceeded to bully the other birds into abandoning their feeding station.

As I write these notes two weeks ahead of publication, this is my first opportunity to record our participation in the garden bird watch, but it was a fascinating experience. I am sure it is of immense value in gauging the true population of garden birds in this country.

Well away from my garden, however, I spotted a female merlin. It was during my morning walk on the hill near our house and she flew across the road directly ahead of me as I was descending the slope.

This enabled me to have a view of her back and wings. I must admit I was briefly puzzled by the sighting for I have never seen a merlin in my part of Yorkshire.

It was the small size of the bird which attracted my interest. The size and the colouring told me it was neither a kestrel nor a sparrow hawk, but one clue was the way it fluttered its wings.

And then, when she flew below me, I could see the brown colouring of the back and wings - the male merlin is a handsome grey-blue on his back and wings. I am now wondering if we are going to have a family of these birds in our locality, but to date I have not seen a male.

My last sighting of a male merlin was in Wensleydale just over three years ago, but during the harsh weather of winter these skilled hunters may move to low-lying areas where it is easier to find food.

Perhaps this lady merlin will move to the wilder lands as spring approaches?

I have come across two dialect words this week. One occurred while my wife and I were enjoying a long walk on the moors. It was a bright, fine day, although the previous days had been very wet with lots of rain. That meant the ground was saturated and most of the paths and tracks we used were thick with mud.

Plothery, in other words. It is such a descriptive word, one which is still used in lots of places. There was a good deal of muck and plother along our walk, and I must admit I was concerned we would become wetshod.

I am not sure there is any difference between muck and plother. It could be argued that plother tends to refer to wet mud, or mud which has been churned up by cattle or even farm vehicles.

Muck, on the other hand, can mean the mess made by animals, such as cow muck, but it can also mean any other kind of dirt.

This has led to words like muckment or even a muck sweat and muck lather - very heavy sweating after hard work. Mucky is also very descriptive and can be used on a host of occasions to suggest unwelcome dirt or even bad weather, foul words and so forth.

Another dialect term has come from a correspondent at Glaisdale in the Esk Valley. She refers to an owsing tin. This was a type of ladle used to lift water from domestic fire-side boilers. It was rather like a mug made of metal and it had a long handle which allowed it to be dipped deep into the boiler to draw out hot water.

The spelling of owsing or owsin seems to vary, but it does not seem that the word derives in any way from house. Instead, it may come from ouse or owse, words originating in the Old Norse ausa, from which we get Ouse, meaning water but generally adopted as a name for several of our rivers.

There used to be a phrase "owse away", meaning to bale water, and it seems the word owse does specifically mean to dip or bale water, or even to pour out.

The spelling of dialect words is never an exact science and one of my dialect dictionaries gives an alternative with an h, i.e. howse, explaining that this means to bale out or dip, but it links that spelling with the examples mentioned above and does not refer to any links with house