A history of the North Yorkshire countryside in 100 objects

At first, says North Yorkshire author Sally Coulthard in her new book A Brief History of the Countryside in 100 Objects, forecasts relied on superstition married with observation – cows were sitting down, geese were flying low, frogs were croaking loudly, tobacco smoke smelt strongly – which were often shoehorned into a rhyming couplet.

Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; red sky in the morning, you know the warning…

In 1850, a Whitby doctor, George Merryweather, decided to introduce a little science into this meteorological mayhem.

He was inspired by a poem, Signs of Rain, by Edward Jenner – the chap who pioneered vaccines – which humorously explained 40 reasons why he could not go out with a friend tomorrow because all the predictors pointed at rain.

One of them concerned leeches, which Jenner kept in glass jars for medical treatments. He noted that when a storm approached, the leeches became agitated and went to the top of the jars. In his poem, he wrote: “The leech, disturb’d, is newly risen Quite to the summit of his prison.”

The appropriately named Dr Merryweather decided to utilise this strange phenomenon and built the Tempest Prognosticator, which is number 80 in Sally’s 100 historical items.

Dr Merryweather's Weather PrognosticatorIn his Prognosticator, Dr Merryweather had a dozen leeches trapped inside a dozen jars – he called them his “jury of leeches”.

When rain approached, the leeches would climb to the top of their jars in an escape bid, triggering a small hammer which rang a bell. The more tings that the jury of leeches emitted from the Prognosticator, the greater the likelihood of a downpour.

“Remarkably, Merryweather’s leech barometer had some success in predicting storms but, perhaps not surprisingly, it failed to become a commercial success,” says Sally who is appearing at the Georgian Theatre in Richmond on September 23 as part of the Richmond Walking and Book Festival.

Author Sally CoulthardShe lives on a smallholding near Ampleforth and his written more than 25 books in the last two decades about the countryside and folklore, and always with an eye for the quirky and the curious.

A Brief History of the Countryside tells the story of rural Britain using the strange objects that our ancestors have left behind over the last 12,000 years, from deer headdresses to dried cats and even chicken goggles.

Chicken gogglesObject number 93 is a pair of chicken googles which come from about 1930 when the countryside was at the beginning of the factory farming era. This included cramming chickens into small wire indoor cages, which reduced costs but brought other problems: the imprisoned birds would peck at each other.

So farmers introduced chicken goggles, which looked like the sort of glasses an optician puts on your nose during an eye test. “The lenses were tinted red, in the belief that it would deter a chicken from pecking another bird’s wounds,” says Sally. “Although comical at first glance, these tiny glasses were often held onto the beak by a split-pin shoved through the bird’s nostrils. Chicken spectacles enjoyed a brief stint of popularity but were superseded by debeaking, a contentious and widespread practice that physically removes the end of the chicken’s beak.”

The 14th Century owl misericord in Lincoln cathedral, which is the start of Sally's stories about man's unusual attitude to his fellow creatures. A misercord is a piece of wood that clergymen lean against during a serviceBut man has not always looked after the creatures of the countryside well. Object number 42 is a 14th Century carved owl in Lincoln Cathedral, there because the owl was believed to be a harbinger of death and misfortune. It was thought to be a lazy bird with dubious toilet practices, but then the hedgehog was condemned for stealing apples and grapes by impaling them on its quills, the earthworm was persecuted for stealing underground seeds by having concoctions involving walnut leaves sprayed at it, the badger was accused of stealing honeycombs from hives, sparrows were estimated to rob farmers of £27m of corn in 1842 and so village “sparrow clubs” were formed to drive them out, and a kingfisher trap (object number 78) was devised to sit on a branch and maim the bird that was a threat to fish stocks.

The kingfisher trap was the smallest mantrap ever produced, and it was left on a kingfisher's favourite perch above the river with the idea of maiming the poor birdThe beaver, though, was believed to elude capture by biting off its own testicles and hurling them at anyone chasing it. “While the beaver’s gonads are actually located internally, both male and female beavers do produce a musky substance called castoreum from sacs near their anal glands, which is used to mark their territory. Castoreum was highly prized in medieval times and added to medicines, perfume and food to such an extent that the beaver was hunted to extinction in Britain by the 16th Century. Castor oil, which is instead extracted from plant seeds, was so called because it was thought to replicate the benefit of beaver secretions.”

Wow! Castor oil, which was given to us at school as a pick-me-up on an almost daily basis, gets its name from a beaver’s testicles.

This just one of the many fascinations in A Brief History of the Countryside – which one reviewer has described as “a charming trayful of historical canapés” – which Sally serves in bitesize pieces (although perhaps not the size of a bite that the beaver makes when pursued).

A Brief History of the Countryside in 100 Objects by Sally Coulthard (HarperNorth, £22). Sally is appearing at the boots and books festival at the Georgian Theatre in Richmond on September 23 at 7.30pm, when she will be in conversation with Chris Lloyd, who compiles Memories. Tickets are £12. More info and booking via bootsandbooks.org. All illustrations are from the book