Travellers' traditional cures; children's wayside foods; har...
Track Information
Original Track ID
SA1988.024
Original Tape ID
Summary
Travellers' traditional cures; children's wayside foods; harvesting cranberries.
Travellers' traditional cures included tying a bandana round the head for headaches, watercress for nausea induced by smoking, carbolic soap and sugar as a poultice, whisky and honey (sometimes from wild bees' nests) for colds, dockens or baking soda for stings, chickweed and olive oil as a salve, whisky for toothache, figs for gumboils, roasted onions for chest or ear complaints, tobacco for wounds (bogie roll was sold cheap when it got hard), and linseed poultices for whitlows. Certain people would buy warts, and they would disappear. Other cures included pish-the-bed (Margaret Bennett suggests this might be coltsfoot) for warts, dandelion sap for chest and throat complaints in place of quinine, dandelion roots for stomach complaints, and another root (which Margaret identifies as tormentil) for diarrhoea.
Betsy Whyte used to eat arnuts [pignut roots]. Margaret ate them on Skye. Betsy also ate sourocks (sorrel), wood sorrel, and hawthorn leaf buds. She gathered cranberries for sale, using a comb.
Item Notes
Recorded at a student seminar in the School of Scottish Studies.
Language
English, Scots
Genre
Collection
Source Type
Reel to reel
Audio Quality
Good