Jan 17th: Twelfth Night, Old style

This is traditionally the time to wassail your apple trees, to encourage them to bear a good crop in the coming year. This is still prevalent today and has been revived in many country areas.

The owner of the orchard, along with friends,  gather in the orchard singing, firing shotguns into the branches and beating the trunks with sticks to drive out the evil spirits to ensure a good crop for the coming year.

Cider is drunk from the wassailing bowl which contains hot spiced cider, lumps of apple and pieces of toast.

The remains from the bowl is poured over the roots as an offering to the Apple Tree Man, and the cider soaked toast is placed in the forks of the trees.

‘Old Apple Tree we wassail thee, and happily thou wilt bear,

For the Lord knows where we shall be,

Till apples another year’

       

The oldest tree in the orchard is inhabited by the Apple Tree Man, who is the guardian of the orchard. To honour him the last few apples must be left for him and the pixies; this custom is called griggling, pixy hoarding and cullpixying.
 The apple symbolises fruitfulness, prosperity,  and rejuvenation and the wood is still seen as a symbol of security. Beware of entering an apple orchard as the trees are inhabited by faeries and pixies, so do not sit beneath a tree and fall asleep or you will fall under a faerie enchantment. If you wish to call upon the faeries summon them with a apple wood wand; and eating an enchanted apple will allow you to enter the faerie realm. You can burn the bark as an offering to the faeries on midsummer night.
from 'Faerie Flora'

Price Promotion

Starting on the 18th Jan 2017, both The Lavender Witch and the second in the series The Cunning Man will be available at various countdown prices for a week from Amazon Kindle.

The Lavender Witch is a chilling ghost story based on the strange but true events surrounding the death of Hannah Beamish, accused of being a witch by a wealthy farmer in a small remote village where she lived in the early 1800’s. 
One hundred and seventy years later these strange events, only now remembered by a few, come to light when Kitty and Gordon move back to the Devon village where they were born, they buy an old orchard from a farmer and build a small house. All is fine until they move in and Kitty spends her first day alone in their new home.
Over the course of their first week in the house chilling apparitions appear and events spiral out of their control bringing the past and present together until the truth emerges as to what really happened on Castle Hill. Was Kitty and Gordon's return to the village a coincidence? And what secrets are the elderly sisters Sybil and Queenie keeping? To save their home and their sanity they must finally put the ghosts to rest. 
The Cunning Man.
During an innocent day trip with the WI to Bindon, a small fishing village on the Dorset coast Queenie and Sybil, the psychic sisters are troubled by the underlying atmosphere of fear and secrecy.
Their curiosity is further piqued when Queenie notices fresh witch marks carved into every door lintel in the village and when they encounter the ghost of a child in the churchyard they realise they have to investigate further.

The Cunning Man: second in The Psychic Sisters series.

Following on from the 'The Lavender Witch'

During an innocent day trip with the WI to Bindon, a small fishing village

 on the Dorset coast Queenie and Sybil, the psychic sisters are troubled by 

the underlying atmosphere of fear and secrecy.

Their curiosity is further piqued when Queenie notices fresh witch marks carved

 into every door lintel in the village and when they encounter the ghost of a child

 in the churchyard they realise they have to investigate further.

Available from Amazon, on Kindle or as a paperback.

www.amazon.co.uk 

or from my website

www.magic-myth-legend.co.uk