In praise of the rowan, a magical tree rooted in history
IN Welsh lore, the cross of Calvary was carved from its wood. The English, of darker mind, thought it was on this tree that the Devil hanged his mother. To Highlanders – and throughout Celtic Europe generally – it was believed to ward off evil spirits.
It is traditionally planted near your gate or door and, in Newfoundland, an exceptionally heavy crop of its berries is thought to foretell an exceptionally hard winter.
No other tree is so hung with lore and legend as Sorbus aucuparia, the sturdy rowan. And perhaps none is so beloved in Scotland, both for the beauties of its fruit in autumn (a vivid, penetrating red against feathered green leaves) and its sheer tenacity. The rowan grows, and even thrives, in some extraordinarily exposed spots.
This year, at least in the West Highlands, the rowan cropped not just unusually early this summer but in great volume – mighty clumps of berries – so, if our Canadian cousins are correct, we may look forward to distinctly Dickensian Christmas conditions.
It is almost a disappointment, having so long claimed the rowan for ourselves in Scots lore and song, to find that it is found throughout the cool temperate realms of the Northern Hemisphere and with the biggest range of varieties in western China and the Himalayas.
Though still known in much of North America as the ‘mountain ash’, the rowan and ash tree are not related (but rowans are close kin to whitebeams and they do actually interbreed).
It was once highly prized for its fruit, rich in vitamin C – though it really has to be cooked, being astringent when raw – though a variety long grown for the kitchen, Sorbus domestica, is now practically extinct in Britain.
These days, rowan berry devotees forage for a wild harvest. The fruit makes a tart, subtle jelly (which goes particularly well with venison) and an interesting wine.
The dried berries have, in times of war or shortage, made a tolerable substitute for coffee and in various cultures they have been brewed and distilled for a liqueur.
The Austrians still make a popular schnapps from rowan berries, and the Welsh and our own Highlanders have in times past produced a notable hooch.
Less enjoyably, the berries can be boiled up for a quick gargle that our forebears deemed efficacious for sore throats. They may have had a point, for the rowan berry has a stronger concentration of vitamin C than any citrus fruit.
For most of us, the tree is most useful as a garden standard, holding its shape elegantly even in very windy or coastal localities and, in berry, a great attraction to little birds. Popular strains include Sargent’s rowan (which bears very large clusters of fruit) and the Chinese white-berried rowan, for its obvious distinction.
ONE variety firmly to avoid is the wild one, the true Sorbus aucuparia, as its blossom smells foul – something between dog dirt and rotting meat. But that is central to its success and why, in favoured conditions, rowans root and thrive with the enthusiasm of weeds, for the stench attracts a rich variety of pollinating insects.
In all, there are more than 90 rowan species and 50 of them are indigenous to Europe.
Though never so esteemed as the oak, lofty as the beech or fruitful of the apple, the rowan has been used in many ways. For one thing, it has very attractive wood: dense hard, elastic, takes a lustrous polish and is a pleasant yellow-brown. It is ideal for carving and ‘turning’ and makes excellent tool handles and walking sticks.
The Finns, who really venerate the rowan, use the timber for rake spikes and cart or sledge shafts. It can also be used for barrel-staves (though oak is best).
Culinary or intoxicating use apart, the berries can make a liquor used as a ‘mordant’ for fixing traditional vegetable dyes.
Fishermen, long ago, sometimes resorted to using the rowan’s bark for making a preservative ‘cutch’ to steep traditional nets in – though, by the late 19th century, cutch from acacia trees was imported wholesale and cheap, and synthetic netting materials finally made such labour redundant.
But the bark of oak and birch trees was preferred, where available and, while rowan wood makes excellent longbows, those fashioned from yew are better still.
Scotland’s most noted specimen, of course, is the Rannoch Rowan, a seemingly indefatigable tree (and with no visible means of nourishment) growing atop a great boulder beside the A82, as you ascend to Rannoch Moor a mile or two north of Bridge of Orchy.
These days you can buy postcards of what (after the venerable Fortingall Yew, which is some 5,000 years young and probably the oldest living thing in Europe) is Scotland’s most famous tree.
The Rannoch Rowan even enjoys its own web listing – courtesy of Forestry Commission Scotland – and there is a curious local custom, that you must always exclaim ‘Hello!’ as you pass it. Its survival – one hesitates to say ‘prosperity’, for this will never be one of your fat and jolly rowans – is not, when closely examined, perhaps as wondrous as you might think.
The tree endures because it so happens to have taken root on a spot – atop a great stone discarded by some long-ago glacier, the sort of random rock geologists call an ‘erratic’ – utterly inaccessible to sheep or deer, for it is a boulder higher than a man is tall.
Its thin, questing roots, deep into a crevasse, win it just enough nutrients to keep going, supplemented by another advantage of its lofty perch. The rock attracts birds eager for rest and vantage (it would have been a bird, perhaps one of the ring ouzels that abound here, that deposited the seed in the first place) and, in the course of nature, they leave a daily and welcome offering of guano.
Even so, it says much for the Rannoch Rowan that it has survived for so long in so bleak and exposed a location, 1,000ft above sea level, utterly open to gales from any direction, iced for weeks on end in frost, lashed (according to season) by rain and blizzard. Nevertheless, it hangs on. All on its lonesome.
The somewhat inaccessible plinth apart, it has been long protected by something else – the deep veneration in which Highlanders still hold the rowan tree, as it was long held across Britain.
The rowan was really prized as most potent protection against witchcraft. In the Germanic and Norse traditions, the tree was honoured because the god Thor (though the stories vary as to how) was saved by a rowan.
To the Druids it was the ‘tree of the bards’ and a feminine tree, offering the gift of ‘awen’, or inspiration: women Druids lived in groves of the things. (The blokes favoured oak, preoccupation with size being a male thing then as now). To this day, the Irish still call it fid na ndruad, ‘the Druids’ Tree’. But they associate it besides with St Bride – herself a recast version, in the Christian era, of the goddess Brigantia, worshipped by the primitive Britons. Beyond even that, ancient Greeks believed the rowan sprang from the blood of a sacred eagle, sent by Zeus to take back the stolen Cup of the Gods.
What endured – everywhere – was the belief that the rowan protected you against all sorts of spells, maleficence and the ‘evil eye’. Its very name in modern English is from the Norse, runa (or ‘charm’).
EVEN in the 20th century, it was thought most unlucky in the Highlands to fell or cut a rowan tree. They were routinely planted within sight of your front door (and still are), from the half-buried folk belief that the tree could ward off evil.
Others simply hung sprigs of it over the door, or fashioned charms they could hang on the family cow (it was widely believed a spiteful witch could ‘stop the milk’). There is no evident logic to any of this, save that the mark of a rowan berry is a five-pointed star (or pentagram, long the symbol of Auld Nick) and that the fruited tree’s vivid contrast, of green and red, embodied emblematically the struggle between life and death.
In Scandinavian folklore we find something particularly relevant to the Rannoch Rowan.
In those wild lands of the North, according to Paul Kendall, of the Caledonian Forest Restoration Project, ‘rowan trees found growing not in the ground but out of some inaccessible cleft in a rock, or out of crevasses in other trees’ trunks or boughs, possessed a more powerful magic, and such trees were known as “flying rowan”.’
Which may be why the Rannoch Rowan is so esteemed.
There is, in conclusion, that soupy auld Scots song:
‘Oh, rowan tree! Oh, rowan tree! Thou’lt aye be dear tae me. Entwined thou art wi’ mony ties o’ hame and infancy…’
Penned by the Queen Mum of Scottish schmaltz, Baroness Nairne, the deathless lyrics were in 1999 immortalised by Runrig’s Pete Wishart, who threw together an SNP fund-raising CD, Twelve Songs for Independence, wherein Margo MacDonald, Winnie Ewing and other Nationalist eminences sang a variety of Scots classics.
It was Alex Salmond himself who sang Oh, Rowan Tree. Mr Wishart has been, subsequently and lang syne, a Nationalist MP. The album ‘was not enough to finish Wishart’s political career’, Gerry Hassan wickedly observed in 2004, ‘but it should finish his musical one’.