Fairy stones, elf bolts and brummel-kite pie

VICTORIAN naturalist Richard Taylor Manson was determined to record everything he could about the flora, fauna and geography of the Darlington area and, at the same time, educate local people to recognise the species they came across in hedges and fields.

His regular articles in the Darlington and Stockton Times not only included notes on the diversity of what could be seen, but also tips on how to identify common sights along his route.

Dr Manson’s treasured book, The Zig-zag Ramblings of a Naturalist, was first published in 1884 with a second edition 15 years later. It details visits he made to well known local places.

At Hell Kettles, a group of ponds between Darlington and Croft, he allowed himself a slight diversion into the folklore surrounding this landmark which has fascinated and bewitched locals for 800 years or more.

Our hero describes his visit to the ponds beginning with a walk through fields along Grange Road, past Blackwell Mill, Stressholm Farm and the sewage farm, with sightings of the flowering plants Pig Nut (Bunium flexuosum), Forgetme- not (Mysotis palustris) and Ragged Robbin (Lychnis floscuculi).

He also encountered plenty of brambles of a species he called Rubus suberectus, with red fruit as opposed to the shiny black variety that is more familiar. The local name for this abundant hedgerow harvest was, he says, brummle- kite.

A former owner of the copy of The Zig-zag Ramblings of a Naturalist I used as a source has noted in the margin that this common name was also in use in a place called Stainley.

Is brummle-kite pie something which makes a seasonal appearance in your kitchen?

Once at the ponds, he concentrates on those plants and animals attracted to the water such as a small snail Paluduna, which can protect itself with a neat trapdoor over the entrance to its shell.

He records that the kettles are surrounded by a lush growth of aquatic plants such as sedges and rushes and draws particular attention to Marsh Arrow Grass (Triglochin palustre), which is described as an elegant plant.

The biodiversity of the area caused it to be registered as a site of special scientific interest for the first time in 1976, and naturalists and ecologists have been monitoring changes over the years.

Most recently the carp which were introduced for the sport of anglers have disappeared from the water, possibly poached.

A sketch of arrowheads Dr Manson found on ramblings and of the Rock Well spring near Haughton-le-Skerne, the rocks of which were a source of fascination

Dr Manson was a vice- president of the Darlington and Teesdale Naturalists Field Club, an organisation which still exists and whose botany leader Falgunee Sarker has updated the plant records for Hell Kettles.

Dr Manson was as fascinated by the stories surrounding these allegedly bottomless ponds as the many people who have written about them and the divine wrath they enforce since they were formed by subsidence in 1179 and recounted in a chronicle attributed to Brompton, Abbot of Jervaulx in 1328. The naturalist is adamant that, whoever did write the chronicle, it was not Brompton.

Saying their colourful name derives from a corruption of halen keld, the accurately descriptive salt spring, he dismisses tales of bottomless depths as “traditionary rubbish”

and recounts how they were measured in his presence by John Clervaux Chaytor, from Croft. The pair found varying depths, the greatest of which was 24ft. Other measurements he quotes come up with a maximum depth less than 20ft – hardly bottomless.

More fanciful stories such as that of a horse and cart being swallowed whole and still visible – floating in the unfathomable depths – are ignored with the contempt they probably deserve.

DR Manson calls his essays on the local area zig-zag ramblings, he says, “because as every field geologist, botanist, conchologist or entomologist knows, it is impossible for a naturalist to work in a straight line. But however devious his wandering he gets back again to the main track”.

The meanderings of his mind are much greater than those of his feet, as becomes apparent when you read his piece on the Rock Well, a natural spring between North Road and Haughton-le-Skerne, in Darlington, which gives its name to the Rockwell Pastures estate.

It is not the water which attracts his attention, but the rock after which the area is named.

Dr Manson discusses the sandstone at Croft, limestone at Piercebridge, different limestone at Barton and Darlington’s heavy clays, saying stone like that at the well exists nowhere else around the town.

The unique nature of the site leads the author into a reverie about the fairies who have played there, in a most unscientific way.

These stories of fairies he then attributes to pre-historic inhabitants of the land, “weeny savage men, diminutive creatures whose ancestors in the still more remote past wandered over the plateaux of the great Euro-Asiatic continent.

“These pygmies had learned to arm themselves with bows and flint-tipped arrows, with flint-headed spears and javelins, and they used flint knives and saws.

The Hells Kettles ponds around which Victorian nature-lover Dr Richard Taylor Manson rambled in his book The Zig-zag Ramblings of a Naturalist

“They quenched their thirst many a time from this very Rock Well of ours, for they certainly dwelt about here.”

Dr Manson had seen many such arrow heads and knew of others collected by “the late Mr Ord and others at Newtown or Newton Ketton, near Brafferton”. But the ramblings of his mind take him much further afield than the neighbouring villages, to Egypt, Italy, North and South America, China and South Africa, all places where similarly- worked stone tools had been found.

The tale then takes an unexpected turn because Dr Manson draws a parallel between the shape of a barbed arrow head and that of a love heart. He says: “After a fashion there is a resemblance to the outline of a heart but a more evident likeness to a barbed arrow head. The upper depression between the two halves does not exist in any heart, and is essentially a characteristic, conventional derivation from this particular variety of flint implement.”

AND back to the fairies, whose workmanship was credited by the superstitious and ignorant with the production of the tiny arrow heads people had been finding for centuries without an explanation as to their origin.

Names given to these artefacts included fairy stones, elf arrow heads and elf bolts. According to tradition, they had been mischievously shot at people and their animals.

Because the source of the objects was magical, the relics were imbued with magical properties, such that a touch from an arrow head or draft of water where one had been dipped was cure for the wounds caused in a fairy attack.

They could be used as a talisman to ward off evil spirits, keep witches at bay and cure diseases.

Dr Manson draws parallels with other cultures in Peru, North Africa and China where they were worn as amulets and shape became more important than authenticity, after which the shape evolved into the love heart we know so well.

Back to the pygmies drinking at the Rock Well, he surmises they were displaced by more incoming waves of settling tribes after the Ice Age and passed into legend as fairies.

What a modern day anthropologist would make of this hypothesis is probably not printable but it is fascinating to think that a token of love you present to that special person in your life could really be a talisman to ward off evil spirits or a hunters weapon from the mists of the prehistoric.

Dr Manson was something of a witch doctor himself because he was a great advocate of vaccination and, as a genuine medical doctor, was responsible for inoculating vast swathes of the population in Darlington and Weardale.

The Hells Kettles illustration found in The Zig-zag Ramblings of a Naturalist by Dr Mason
 

Another place Dr Manson seems to have been particularly fond of was South Park, a place he calls Our Park.

As a geologist he was particularly interested in how the area came to be as it is and the landscape before it was bent to the will of man. He relates it to an 16th Century reference to Laurence Thornell “baylyf”, of Darlington, who was the owner of “Low Park of Darlington and the Meadowes on the Skerne” and who left instructions to be buried in St Cuthbert’˜s Church yard.

He speculated that this Low Park was on the east side of the river in the area of Parkgate and that South Park developed from a continuation of the meadow land which made up the former. He takes place names such as Park Street and Park Place, both leading off Parkgate, as evidence in favour of his theory.

The Skerne valley between Croft and Darlington is larger than the present river could have carved out. He supposes: “I imagine there was once a lake occupying the Skerne Valley – just as at Morden Carrs...

there may even have been more than one lake connected by the river.”

And it is the river than connects these three sites, Hell Kettles, South Park (or New Park as Dr Manson knew it) and the Rock Well. History, geology, folklore and superstition over many ages and all within a distance of a few miles.