Wrap up well for the ice saints

The days run from May 11 to May 14 and this period of four days has a reputation for producing some unusually cold weather, so much so that many sheep farmers would avoid shearing their flocks until the end of this spell.

One old Yorkshire saying tells us: "He who shears his sheep before St Serviatus' Day loves the wool more than the sheep."

So who are the Ice Saints? They are four saints whose feast days fall within this period - St Marmertus (May 11), St Pancras (May 12), St Serviatus (May 13) and St Boniface (May 14).

Little is known about any of these saints, although St Pancras is perhaps the most familiar, if only because a London railway station bears his name.

He is not the patron saint of railway stations, however - the railway station in question was built on the site of a former church dedicated to St Pancras.

The young Pancras or Pancrasius, born around AD 304, went to Rome with an uncle and lived close to Pope St Marcellus, who was then in hiding from the Diocletian persecutors.

The Pope baptised both Pancras and his uncle, but the young Pancras was martyred by beheading when he was only 14 years old.

The Roman church of St Pancrazio was built on the site of his martyrdom and a monastery was later established nearby on land owned by Pancras' family.

It was from that monastery that St Augustine came to England to establish the Catholic church in this country and, later, Pope Vitalian (657-671) sent some of St Pancras' relics to England to be in the care of King Oswy of Northumbria.

Oswy built a church to contain them and churches dedicated to St Pancras can still be found in England, Italy, Spain and France.

But we remember St Pancras thanks to cold weather and a railway station!

There is always interest in how a town or village acquired its name and, as I was compiling these notes, I came across a curious reason for the origin of Bedale's name.

Down the years since the eleventh century, it has variously been known as Bedale (1068), Bedhal (1256), Bedehale (1504), Bedel (1514) and Bidell (1564) and it seems these names arose because it was once the settlement of a man called Beda.

Even today, local people refer to the town by a name which sounds like Beedle rather than Bedale.

Whatever its pronunciation, it appears the name was thought to mean Beda's nook of land, with the word 'dale' replacing the 'hal' or 'hale' which appeared during the thirteenth century.

According to Edmund Bogg in his wonderful book Beautiful Wensleydale, the name might have come from a different source.

He quotes Rev Charles Merchant, who said that, in his opinion, Bedale's name came from Bethe, with a distinct possibility that the Anglians named the area Bethe-land or Begadale.

The Bethe, however, was not a personal name but the former title of the stream which rises near Barden Moor.

This beck, now called Garrison Beck in its upper reaches and Brompton Beck lower down, flows along the side of Wensleydale via Hunton before heading south through Patrick Brompton to join another stream which also flows down Wensleydale.

This second stream, in its upper reaches, is variously known as Bellerby Beck, Burton Beck, Leeming Beck and Newton Beck.

But after it joins Brompton Beck near Patrick Brompton, the single stream is known as Bedale Beck. It flows on to join the River Swale to the south-west of Morton on Swale.

None of my sources refers to Garrison Beck (under any of its alternative names) as the River Bethe, Bethe Beck or merely Bethe, so one must assume that it was a very ancient name for this water course.

That ancient name appears to have disappeared from our modern version of recorded history.

Bogg records another interesting aspect of Bedale's history.

He says that fairs were held regularly in the town and these became famous for certain goods, namely horned cattle, sheep, horses, leather, pewter, brass, tin and milliners' goods.

It was the last item which seemed slightly out of place, but it seems that when the fairs came to town, the women of Bedale insisted on being present, and insisted on their rights to be, as Bogg puts it, bonny.

It seems that the women of Bedale took an enormous pride in their appearance, hence the feminine goods on sale during the fairs.

There is an old verse which reminds us of this:

Bedale bonnets and Bedale faces,

Find nowt to beat 'em in any places -

For t'first are fairings an' t'last are graces.

This verse would appear to suggest that the bonnets on sale at Bedale were of the highest quality and that the women were the most beautiful and graceful in the area! Who can dispute that?

If anyone was to ask what distinguishes May from the other months of the year, one answer must surely be that it is so richly adorned with blossom.

Hedgerows, woods, gardens, parks, fields, riverbanks and elsewhere are rich with colour and variety as brilliant new blooms colour the countryside.

It is difficult to highlight one wild flower from such a variety of wonderful examples, but the bluebell must rank among the most impressive.

To witness countless thousands of bluebells growing in a woodland glade is almost like seeing a magic carpet. The density and colour of the flowers seems to create a type of haze around their heads, almost as if a cloud of blue light is hovering just above ground level.

I have seen crowded fields of other flowers like daffodils and tulips, and even poppies, but none produces the same ethereal effect as thousands of bluebells massed together in a wide carpet.

For all its popularity in this country, the bluebell does not grow in Mediterranean countries, being unknown in Greece and Italy, but restricts its presence to lands bordering the Atlantic ocean.

Although a native of this country, it was not mentioned in early works of reference because the original herbalists referred only to plants with Mediterranean origins, but it does appear in a book dated 1548 when it was known as crowtoes.

Being such a popular and widespread flower, it enjoys a range of different names across this country, including crakefeet, cross-flower, crowbells, blue bonnets, adder's flower, blue bottle, bummack, blue trumpets, greygiles, wood bells, fairy bells, grigglesticks, snapgrass, rook's flower, ring o' bells and many more.

Not surprisingly, it has attracted the attention of our poets and I like the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins when, in his journal of 1871, he writes about bluebells "in falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks of the ground with vein-blue".

He also commented on the fact that when the stalks rub together, they make a noise "like a hurdle strained by leaning against".

Keats referred to them as "shaded hyacinth, always sapphire queen of mid-May" and Tennyson said they were like the blue sky breaking up through the earth.

In Elizabethan times, the bulbs of bluebells were highly prized for making both glue and starch. Archers used to scrape the bulbs to obtain a glue which, I understand, was used to help in fletching their arrows.

But the chief use of the bulbs was to make starch which was used to stiffen the ruff collars worn by the fashionable people of that time.

Although the uprooting of bluebell bulbs is illegal, it seems that regular picking of the flowers does not harm their reproduction. The real damage occurs when their leaves are trampled down by careless ramblers - if the bluebells' leaves are crushed they will be starved of food and will die.

That's one more fact of rural life for the right-to-roam brigade to heed