Above:wild garlic in flower
Every year about this time and for the next month or so, we will go for walks to forage for wild garlic. In Scotland wild garlic often grows and flowers slightly later than down south, just due to temperature, so at the moment we only forage for a handful of leaves to allow the plants to mature.
Where we go foraging is basically out of our back door and along a road that was once called stane road. Nowadays this road is a back road in the village busy with walkers and cyclists, deer and horses but back in the 1600s this was one of the main roads that linked Stirling to Kinross. The road used to go to the only place where you could ford the river in our village. That changed in the 1700s when a small bridge was built a little further downstream, so the road that once carried people to the medieval market now takes a sharp left turn, over the river and up to the coaching inn, which is now a pub!
Now most people don't know that this road is actually famous in a bit of a macabre way. In 1662 this road was travelled by the 13 witches in our village on the way to meet the devil!.
The story goes that the 12 females and 1 male would walk this road to meet up with the devil at a nearby gorge. They would pledge to do his bidding, drink, eat and be very merry all on the Devils Sabbat, Saturday night.
Above: these days a sign points the way to the devil
The river that feeds the gorge and runs alongside the old stane road, starts its descent into the gorge at a place called The Devils Mill. Water drops quite suddenly into a very deep hole and then crashes through huge slabs of rocks as it makes its way downstream. The mix of the water falling and rushing over the rocks cause sounds like the workings of a mill to echo off the sides of the gorge as though some unseen force is forging metal! The river then falls spectacularly into the gorge and Cauldron Linn. The Witch references just keep building up!
Above: the waters if the Cauldron Linn
So what has this got to do with the hunt for garlic? Well one of the best places to find wild garlic in our area is at the Devils Mill but not only that, a majority of accused Witches in Scotland had the fact that they were folk healers held against them.
Herbal remedies or folk remedies were used by everyone and there are even books with the remedies in them from the 1600s. Church ministers would use herbal remedies along with prayer to help cure illnesses but they would make a very distinct difference between herbal healing (with Gods help) and spell casting with herbs, even though the recipes were usually exactly the same.
The persecution of Witches is a huge and varied subject and involved all aspects of life, so we will do a future blog and podcast about Witches, Herbs and Food at a later day. For now back to our Witches and the Garlic!
Most people accused of Witchcraft were women and either poor to "middling" class, therefor they would rely on herbal recipes for their every day ills.
A recipe from the 1600s to help cure toothache included GARLIC, oak leaves, henbane and strawberries
Another to help you if you had eaten something poisonous contained GARLIC and St Johns Wort
If you wanted to cure the plague then you would need GARLIC, dried ivy berries and sage.
Some of the recipes contain such things as wild strawberries, which grow freely here, elderberry flowers that can be found lining the fields that surround us, how about dock leaves that are on every road side or Ladys Mantle that grows freely wherever it can?
We think nothing of foraging these items but 500 years ago, having knowledge of of how to use these plants could land you with a date with the executioner and that is exactly what happened to some of the Witches from the village. They were healers who used folk medicine, who foraged for plants in the same way we did along the exact same route that we walked.
All but 2 of the accused Witches were strangled then burnt in the village. One poor lady died before the trial and one lady was only spared due to being pregnant.