The Fabled Coast: Legends & traditions from around the shores of Britain & IrelandRandom House, 2012 M06 28 - 528 pages Pirates and smugglers, ghost ships and sea-serpents, fishermen’s prayers and sailors’ rituals – the coastline of the British Isles plays host to an astonishingly rich variety of local legends, customs, and superstitions. |
From inside the book
... birds born from shellfish (seeBANNOW BAY, Southern Eire) – disappeared from natural history books, but even in the twentieth century it remained acceptable among Catholics in some places to eat geese on fast days, since their flesh ...
... birds wheeled and screamed. See alsoCARDIGAN BAY (Wales). LIHOU, CHANNEL ISLANDS. Fishermen. salute. the. rocks. On the tiny island of Lihou there once stood a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. By the seventeenth century there was little ...
... birds most often said to house souls are crows, ravens and choughs, and at sea, they include storm petrels, traditional harbingers of tempest also known as MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS . It was forbidden for a seaman to shoot a storm petrel ...
... kill gulls, and that they embodied the souls ofthe dead – were not inseparable. The naturalist Peter Emerson found belief in reincarnation as gulls active in the nineteenth century, but without the taboo on killing the bird.
... bird. He was astonished to learn that many old fishermen on the east coast believed that they would turn into gulls when they died, and asked one man if he did not dislike their being shot on that account. He replied philosophically ...
Contents
Hampshire Kent London Sussex Isle ofWight | |
Essex Norfolk Suffolk | |
NORTHEAST ENGLAND | |
NORTHWEST ENGLAND ISLE OF | |
WALES | |
SCOTTISH LOWLANDS | |
Highland Orkney Shetland Western Isles | |
CountiesAntrim Donegal Down Galway Louth Mayo Meath Sligo | |
Counties Clare Cork Dublin Kerry Waterford Wexford | |
Bibliography | |
References | |
Index | |