amuletsRowan crosscaorann

The rowan's reputation is older than the charm's paperwork. British folklorists of the Victorian era reported the belief in the tree's power to turn away witches: Edwin Lees wrote it up for the Wyre Forest in 1856, James Frazer reported it from Scotland in 1890 — where the tree was often planted by a gate or a front door — and Charles Godfrey Leland reported English traditions of the same in 1891, citing the Denham Tracts, collected between 1846 and 1859. Frazer singled out the flying rowan, a rowan seeded by bird droppings into the fork of an oak or a maple and growing as an epiphyte, as especially potent against witches and as a counter-charm against sorcery.

What the twigs were for is agricultural before it is anything else. In Scottish folklore boughs of rowan were taken into cattle byres in May to protect the livestock, rowan trees were planted in pastures for the same reason, and twigs were used to drive cattle out to grass for the first time in spring to secure their health and fertility. In English folklore the wood was worked into the shafts of farm implements to keep animals and produce out of reach of witches' spells, and rowan was chosen for the post or mantel over a fireplace. Thomas Keightley recorded that mortals could safely watch the fairy rades — the mounted processions the fairies were said to hold at the onset of summer — by putting a rowan branch over their doors.

The objects survive because a clergyman posted them to Oxford. On 28 February 1893 the Rev. Canon John Christopher Atkinson, of Danby Parsonage, Grosmont, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, gave the Pitt Rivers Museum three rowan loops, accessioned as 1893.18.1–3, the smallest 70 mm across; Atkinson had published on the practice in 1891. The museum's account records that from Scotland to Cornwall crosses of the same wood were bound with red thread and carried in pockets or sewn into the linings of coats, and that in Strathspey a loop of rowan was made at May Day and flocks of sheep and lambs were driven through it morning and evening.

Tradition holds — the charm goes with a couplet, usually given in Scots as "Rowan tree and red thread, gar the witches tyne their speed" — gar is to compel, tyne is to lose. This record has not read that rhyme in any of the sources it cites, and prints it here as a thing people say rather than as a documented text.

Cut green, from a living tree, at a named time — the Pitt Rivers account gives St Helen's Day for collecting, and May Day and Lammas for the rites the loops belong to. Two twigs are crossed and lashed at the join with red thread or wool; a loop is bent from one withy and tied. The finished charm goes over a door or a byre lintel, into a pocket, or into a coat lining. Tradition holds — it is cut fresh each year, the old one discarded, which is why so few reach museums.

Made and sold by British craftworkers and by shops trading in folk charms, and made at home by people who have read about it. Inference — the continuous farming practice the Victorian folklorists recorded is not what is happening now; what is happening now is a revival working from those same published accounts, and this record separates the two rather than running them together.