Back
in the summer of last year, we were in Shropshire for a few days
exploring before going to Festival at the Edge, the wonderful
storytelling and music gathering there. In museums and little towns,
we found mentions of Mary Webb, a writer and novelist of the early
20th
century who lived in the area and evoked the landscape, traditions
and folklore of her native Shropshire in her writings. I confess
that neither of us had heard of her before, though her writings are
widely known amongst people living in the local area. Sue bought
several of her novels in a second hand shop, and has read all of her
published writings since then, and now has ended up as a committee
member of the Mary Webb Society!
We met with a few friends at
Festival at the Edge, and one of the highlights of the festival was a
performance at the music tent – ‘The Lives and Loves of Mary
Webb’ by Beguildy, a duo comprising Anne Marie Summers and Janie
Mitchell. Their singing was beautiful and, though they played a good
variety of instruments, Anne Marie didn’t play any of her bagpipes
for this performance. The songs were actually poems by Mary Webb
which they had collected and set to music, it really was a moving and
memorable experience and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who left
with tears in my eyes.
But how does any of
this relate to bagpipes? Well, in reading her novels, poems and
essays, we came across a few mentions of bagpipes. They come from
works published in 1917, when we might expect references to reflect
the strident sound of Highland pipes or a military aspect, but
instead two of the references remark upon the enchanting and hypnotic
nature of the bagpipe.
Firstly
though, a more usual, slightly disparaging view of a bagpipe’s
tone, from her novel Gone to Earth.
“The
one-eyed cat was beside her, blue-ribboned, purring her best, which
was like a broken bagpipe on account of her stormy youth.”
But later in the same
work, she relates a softer, humming tone of a pipe when relating a
visit of some of the characters to the bees in a walled garden.
“she
could hear the queen in one hive ‘zeep-zeeping’ – that strange
music which, like the maddeningly soft skirl of bagpipes, or the
fiddling of Ned Pugh, has power to lure living creatures away from
comfort and full hives into the unknown – so darkly sweet”
A similar reference
appears in Mary Webb’s collection of nature essays published as
‘The Spring of Joy’ in the same year, 1917.
“There the queen bee
with her strange, low piping – a mere breath of sound, but stirring
the same frenzy as bagpipes played softly before a battle – wakens
madness in her followers, and lures them through the gates of
adventure as Ned Puw's fiddle inveigled folk through the gates of
Faery.”
The Ned Pugh, or Ned
Puw, she refers to is the character in folk tale of the
Shropshire/Wales border, usually a fiddler, though on rare occasion
called a piper, who boldly or foolishly, ventures into a cave which
leads to the land of the fairies and is never seen again, though his
music is often heard under the ground.
So, there are only a
few references, but I thought them worth sharing as they are some evidence that people were aware of
the sweet sound of bagpipes in early 20th century
Shropshire, and that I do like the description ‘That strange music
– so darkly sweet’.
