The Wansdyke & District Forums

A gentler subject for harvest time. The corn dolly: the last sheaf of the harvest plaited into a shape and kept through the winter, then ploughed back in or fed to the horses in the spring. The society has a lovely collection of the old county patterns, the Wiltshire whorl among them. The belief, where anyone remembers a belief at all now, is that the spirit of the corn lives in the last sheaf, and that you keep her safe over winter in the dolly and return her to the field in spring so the corn will come again. Whether anyone truly believed it, or whether it was just the shape of the year, it is a kindly thought: that you would give the spirit of the field a warm place by the hearth until it was time.

The last-sheaf customs are some of the cruellest and tenderest we have, Janet, side by side. In some places they raced to cut the last stand of corn by throwing their sickles at it, so that no one person could be blamed for killing the corn spirit. In others they made the last sheaf into the Hag, the Cailleach, and the farmer who got her had bad luck or a hungry winter, so you flung her into your neighbour's field if you could. Tenderness and a kind of dread, both at once, for the same handful of wheat. We have lost the dread and kept the prettiness, which is perhaps a pity. The dread is where the meaning was.

You always find the darker root, Annie, and you are right to. I shall think of the thrown sickles next time I admire a tidy little dolly in a gift shop. Still, I am glad we kept the prettiness; better a remembered shape than nothing at all. Do come and see the collection, we have one nobody can identify, a sort of double knot, that may be unique to one vanished village's harvest. Even the dollies have their lost villages.