Illustration © Liam Lefr
The lockdown has eased a little and I am on the deck of a ferry rumbling across the Solent to the Isle of Wight, under a pale, spring sun. I grew up on the island so this is a trip home, but it is also something of a magical quest.
Despite glorious views from the deck, my thoughts are mainly with a medieval woman called Julian. She was a mystic and anchorite who lived for years sequestered alone in a cell attached to a church in Norwich. At some point in her life she became gravely ill and expected to die and had a series of “shewings”—or visions from God. On one occasion:
“He showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was as round as a ball.”
She asked what it was, and she was told it was “all that is made”. She had the whole cosmos in her hand, and she marvelled that something so immense could be contained in so small a shell. She was told it was sustained by the love of God. She recorded her shewings in her book Revelations of Divine Love. Over six hundred years later I read her account of that hazelnut when I was a teenager and was entranced by it. I am thinking about her today because I am on a quest to find some very unusual hazelnuts.
I have been drawn to hazelnuts for years, but it wasn’t until I was lighting candles one day, at my ancestor altar, that I realised the extent of this attraction. The tabletop around the candles was covered with them. I started a census: how many were there? Where had I picked them up? What were their stories?
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There were four half-shells. You can tell what kind of creature has eaten the nut by the way they have opened the shell. By far the most common is the cleanly sliced half-shell. This is the work of Squirrels. There is a place in the woods where I have made a circle to do magic. I dug these half-shells from the dirt ground inside my circle and I have used them often over the years for divination. Geomancy is a form of divination that relies on figures created randomly from ones and twos, for example, some people toss coins. Half hazelnuts can be cast in the same way because they only land up or down.
There were a number of nuts I have burned with a hot needle. Some had sigils on which I have since buried in that same earth to decay the next time I visited the forest. On some I had written in tiny burned letters “Mother Julian. Pray for Us”. These I give as gifts to those who might need or appreciate them.
There were two fat and gloriously dark brown nuts that I found half in the ground of a disused holloway in the lee of the South Downs. A holloway is a path so ancient that feet and wheels have gouged it down into the surrounding country, sometimes the sides are twenty feet high and more, and trees grow on top of that, so that meeting above it, a green tunnel is created. The holloway I found was only a hundred metres long and it was clear no one had used it for decades. The soil was softer than feathers and the air was green and secret. When I stopped to sit with the place for a while, I found these nuts. They slipped into a pocket and then to the front of my altar at home.
Two nuts were almost black. On a fearsomely stormy day in Cornwall my partner and I battled along a beach in a small cove and from the weed and detritus at the high tide line came two hazelnuts. Southern Cornwall is famous for its tree-lined rivers that meander out to sea. These nuts had clearly fallen into a river and been carried out and back again. They are the darkest, shiniest, hardest nuts in this census.
There is another nut which was found on a different shoreline. This one is almost grey, its shiny surface is gone. The exposed ridges are deep and clear. It is the nut equivalent of a leaf-skeleton.
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All these nuts have come to me. Placing them in front of the ancestor altar just seemed the right thing to do. Each one is a little bit of magic. Today though, disembarking from the ferry, I am setting off to find hazelnuts deliberately for the first time. The west of the Isle of Wight is a far cry from the bucket-and-spade image of the seaside towns on the east and north of the island. High cliffs, wild Atlantic seas and deep chines dominate the coastal landscape here. An hour from the ferry is Compton Bay, famous for its dinosaur footprints and fossils from many millions of years ago. I am after something ancient but not quite so ancient.
Hazel as a species is one our oldest companions in northern Europe. As the ice advanced and retreated over millennia humans and hazel moved with it. There is archaeological evidence back to the Mesolithic of humans gathering hazelnuts for food in vast quantities. It is thought Hazel might have been one of the very first species to be cultivated. No wonder it felt right to place them in front of the ancestors. At Compton Bay high in the eroding cliff face is a layer of gravel, an ancient riverbed, 8,000 years old. Pieces of wood from trees that overhung that river and fell in are occasionally exposed and tumble to the beach, partially fossilised. Among those remains are often found, of course, hazelnuts.
The breadth of the folklore about hazel surely reflects its long companionship with human beings. Best known, perhaps, is the hazel wand. Throughout European magic, the use of a hazel wand is widespread: it is often procured at dawn, on Midsummer’s Eve, cut with one blow, from ‘virgin’ growth; sometimes it is cut behind one’s back, to be the length of the forearm. Different source texts include different combinations of these requirements. The variety, historically, means that today we can take a wide view and understand these as expressions of an underlying ritual structure surrounding the creation of a hazel wand. It’s like learning the grammar underlying a language.
In the UK, hazel has folkloric associations with Faeries; in her book Under the Witching Tree, Corrine Boyer presents two spells, one from the 15th and one from the 17th century which use hazel sticks and hazel buds respectively to help the witch see the little people. Hazel is also helpful with weather magic: contemporary reports of witch trials in Europe detail the calling up of storms by beating water with hazel rods. There is a connection with lightning; there was a widespread belief that hazel trees were never struck by lightning, and therefore it followed that hazel was good for protecting the house against a strike. In various parts of the UK and Europe, a hazel rod, a cross of hazel, or a hazel rod driven through the body of a Robin were used to ward off lightning from houses or crops. Snakes too have woven their story into that of the hazel: in Ireland there was a legend that St Patrick drove out the snakes with a hazel switch; there are medieval and early modern charms against snakes and their bites, that use hazel, from places as far apart as Sweden, the Balkans, the Black Forest and the West Country. Tellingly, there isn’t much in the herbals about hazel; probably this is because, like potatoes and carrots, the primary relationship we have with this plant is as food.
The thing that draws me most to these tiny, humble little nuts is this long standing relationship with humans. It is something of that depth of time that I am trying to capture through my quest on the Isle of Wight. It was 8000 years ago that this river ran, that these hazelnuts fell, and also that the glaciers in Northern England and Scotland melted. The glacial meltwater flooded the low-lying woodland between what is now the Isle of Wight and the mainland and created The Solent. These semi-fossilised hazelnuts share their time with that huge flooding event. Is this why, for centuries these humble remnants of that time have been known to islanders as Noah’s Nuts? Maybe, except that the first reference I can find to that name comes from the 1790s. This is long before we had an understanding of ice-ages, glaciation and the flooding that would have created the Isle of Wight. It is extremely unlikely that there is continuity of understanding between islanders today and those who lived 8000 year before, but our human ancestors and other species, like the hazel tree, have travelled some very long lines through time and those lines come together and cross and merge in all kinds of ways. It is those lines that create story and magic. It is also those lines which lead directly to me on my knees, with the sun on my back at the bottom of a cliff searching for 8000-year-old hazelnuts. Did I find any? Not this time. But I will be back.