The early October forest is at the turning point, that enchanted time of year when everything is changing form and colour. It havers, slipping backwards and forwards across the threshold between dark and light, the underworld of woodsy rot and the sky-song of geese, the realms of substance and spirit.
Last night, the stars were fiercely bright and this morning we woke to frost. It still clings to the shadowed hollows of the ground cover and the lacework of spider webs. Higher up, the trees are stirring softly, like a great mystery is coming. The cascading birch boughs are tinged with yellow, the upright aspens a spangling of gold, paper-thin coins trembling against the high blue.
Among them, the rowan trees throw out their arms, still feathery green and bearing clusters of bright red berries. Graceful as a folk tale queen, rowan is the mystical tree of the Celtic world, believed to hold sway against the forces of darkness. Bane of the devil and his dominion, she brought protection by absorbing witches’ curses and fairies’ spells.
Many people believed that to cut a rowan would release this evil back into the world and some foresters still refuse to fell one. But in other traditions, the wood was cut for spindles and walking sticks, or milk stirrers to prevent curdling, or even divining wands. People made equal-armed crosses from rowan twigs and sewed them into their clothes while, further back, druids reportedly used the bark to blacken their robes.
The magic, it seemed, flowed both ways. Once planted as sentinels beside churches and houses, rowans can still be seen alone and wind-bent above the stones of ruined crofts. Tragically, they proved powerless against the lairds and their clearances.
Also called Lady of the Mountains, Quicken, Tree of the Wizard and caorann in Scots Gaelic, she has given her simple name “Rowan” to women and men alike. A true giving tree, she yields her berries to blackbirds, thrushes and waxwings, though for human taste, they must be bubbled in a cauldron with harvest apples and sugar. Best eaten with wild game, if you can charm the keeper.
As I stand in the woods at the season’s doorway, the low sun fires the red berries and I can feel the rowan warding off my autumnal gloom.
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