The Wansdyke & District Forums

I do love this forum for the old things. Heres a thread for the sayings, the bits of weather-lore and country wisdom your people had that nobody says any more. My grandmother had one for everything. Rain before seven, fine before eleven. If the cows are lying down its coming on to rain. Oak before ash, in for a splash; ash before oak, in for a soak, for which tree came into leaf first in the spring. Never let the fire go right out at the turning of the year. And a great many about not doing certain things on certain days that i never understood and she would not explain, only that you didnt. What did your families say?

What a lovely thread, Nancy. The weather ones often hold up, of course, because they are centuries of watching the same sky. But it is the inexplicable ones I treasure, the do-nots with no reason given, because those are the genuinely old ones, the ones that survived precisely because nobody could argue them away with sense. My grandmother would not let washing be hung out on Good Friday, nor a new thing be brought into the house feet-first, and could no more tell you why than fly. The reason wore away centuries ago and the rule kept walking without it. That is folklore in its purest form: the shoe of a belief whose foot is long gone.

my father read the weather better than any forecast off the telly, all of it from his own father. red sky, the way the smoke lay of an evening, how the sheep moved, where the swallows flew. none of it written down. when he went a lot of it went with him and i wish now id listened harder instead of thinking i knew better. thats the thing with all this, its in people not books, and when the people go its just gone. no record of it anywhere.

Thats it exactly Bill, and it makes me sad and glad at once. Sad for whats lost, glad we are writing a little of it down here at last. Maybe thats what this whole forum is really for, when you get down to it. Keeping a few of the old things from going out like your fathers fire. Somebody should. Might as well be us.