Gelli: Sacred Groves of the Druids

A Tale of Acorns, Blackthorn and The Screech Of The Woods!

There are several strands to this saga which connect together in a most remarkable way. I'm indebted to F W M Vera for part of the tale, someone I've mentioned before here- he treats it, almost in passing- in his seminal work on Grazing Ecology and Forest History.

But first I'll start with Cymraeg and the word Gelli¹, which means a grove and is found in many place names in Cymru. Just down the way from me is Gelli Gemlyn, or Cemlyn's Grove, and a bit further up is Gelli Goch, or Red Grove. Groves were long associated with the Druids as their sacred places. Julius Caesar makes a lot of the Druids as fostering the resistance to Rome and after his brutal ten year conquest and subjugation of Gaul (from 50-40BC), its thought that many of the surviving Druids fled to Britain and in particular, to Ynys Môn, or Anglesey², which was an important religious centre for the Druids of Britain and the continent.

The Roman Historian Tacitus, writing in his Agricola, (chapter 30), provides a dramatic account of the Roman invasion and conquest of the island after which “The religious groves, dedicated to superstition and barbarous rites, were levelled to the ground.”

I'd often wondered about these Druidic groves, what they were made up of and whether they were planted by the Druids or somehow natural. Robert Graves gives some rather fanciful ideas in The White Goddess but it was on reading Vera's book that an elegantly simple explanation became clear- the Jays planted them, and here's how.

above: The Jay, Sgrech Y Coed, garrulus glandarius (stock photo). I don’t like to use stock photos but I’ve tried photographing Jays and they seem to immediately sense my attention through the lens and scarper, screeching noisely, as they do, and I end up with a blurred snap of their bum…

Jays are beautiful, colourful birds, the blue barring on the wings is especially fine. In the Cymraeg, they're called, most aptly, Sgrech Y Coed³, which in English is something like the Screech or Scream of the Woods (or the Wood's Screech). Their Latin name, garrulus glandarius, also gives good clues as to their nature and behaviour- garrulus means something like babbling, chattering, having the habit of talking a lot, especially about unimportant things and glandarius means of or pertaining to nuts or acorns. There you have probably the two most significant features of the bird, the raucous cry when disturbed and their habit of collecting and eating acorns.

The fact that they are a member of the crow family and will take young nestlings if the opportunity arises means some people really don't like them, and I mean really don't like them; one of our near neighbours hates them absolutely, with a remarkable vehemence, describing them as cruel and evil. Mmmm. Bit like some people then? Except people have a choice, the jays just follow their own nature...

As the name suggest, Jays eat acorns and are well adapted to carrying them, maybe two or three or even more (up to nine!) in their gullets and one in their beak. Over the autumn they will collect several thousand and store them for winter food by burying them. They can fly up to four kilometres before they stash their acorns in individual holes and are thought to be responsible for the relatively rapid spread of oak trees into Britain as the land warmed up after the ice age.

Over the winter and into the spring, they'll return to their many burial sites, dig up the acorns and eat them. By the time spring arrives, some of these acorns may have sprouted but no worries, the Jay will give the young seedling a tug and chances are, oink it out. The two halves of the acorn represent a valuable food source, even after sprouting and will still be present to begin with. However, as the spring progresses, the young oak seedling will rapidly put down a strong tap root and the Jay will find it harder and harder to uproot.

Above: Sgrech Y Coed: the Screech of the Woods (another stock photo- I’ll just have to try harder…).

So the answer to the question, why does the Oak have such a strong tap root when few other trees do, is by natural selection as a result of the action of the jays. The acorns that put down stronger taproots more quickly, are the ones that the Jays couldn't pull up and hence have survived to reproduce.

The Jays will usually “plant” more acorns than they'll get round to eating anyway but obviously, when older jays die over the winter, considerable numbers of their planted acorns may grow on into fine trees.

We need to weave in another strand here, namely, the blackthorn. This shrubby, small tree is often used in hedging due to its fierce, spiny thorns. Anyone who has anything to do with it, such as attempting to lay it, will tell you that not even the best, thickest gloves will protect you from every thorn; they'll get through and when they do the end, sharper than a needle, will probably break off and despite half an hours home surgery with your own needle, you'll be lucky to get it all out, and they almost invariably go septic. Be warned!

above: 50mm of hard wood leading to a thorn sharper than a need;e. Ouch!

The vicious thorns means its amongst the few plants that can establish in the presence of grazing and browsing animals, like deer and is often found in ffridd and ffridd remnants along with Hawthorne and gorse.

Its other main characteristic is that rather than just spreading by seed, it also suckers; that is, as the roots spread out through the soil from the mother plant, it sends out new top growth from the roots, thus forming an ever widening circle of thorn, unless controlled. In a natural setting, this ever widening circle expands at the rate of about half a metre a year, perhaps slowed somewhat by herbivores grazing off some of the suckers when they are still young and relatively soft.

above: I’ve not found it easy to capture suckering in a photograph but all the paler green growth in the foreground here are Blackthorn suckers arising from roots spreading out from the thicket in the midground.

I've been observing several examples of expanding blackthorn thickets locally though unfortunately, the best one was recently cut down before I could get in there for a good look. However, the other examples are continuing their steady expansion ever outwards.

above: ever expanding thicket of Blackthorn. The pale areas like blossom are lichens. This thicket is about 4 metres at its highest and there is a ruined house in there, somewhere…

Now we can bring in Sgrech again, the jay. The jays don't just bury their acorns anywhere as they need to be able to remember and return to hundreds of different locations. It's thought that they choose sites on the edges of shrubs, and identify each one according to unique patterns of light and shade and it turns out that the edge of a blackthorn thicket is ideal for this.

So the jays plant the acorns in the edge of the expanding thicket of Blackthorn. Some of the acorns sprout and get a tap root down quickly and the jay can't uproot them. The spiky Blackthorn thicket engulfs the oak saplings, protecting them from herbivores. As the thicket continues to expand, the young oaks grow upward for the light and pop out above the thorn, eventually spreading their branches and shading out the part of the thicket beneath them.

We get an ever expanding ring of blackthorn with the centre now shaded out beneath growing oaks and grass reappearing beneath the the trees- a grove. The ring of Blackthorn can be dense, impenetrable to most herbivores but a human, say a Druid, could cut a way in, or possible follow a route where a wild boar has pushed through. Inside the protective ring, oaks and a sward, a most secluded, secret place, easily given over to the sacred.

I observed something similar on Argel, my wilderness regeneration project, where the spiky gorse fulfilled a similar role to the blackthorn, growing outward, engulfing trees and protecting them from the deer. When the trees popped out the top and spread their branches, the gorse was shaded out and died within just a couple of seasons.

above: gorse clump protecting trees from deer on Argel with a birch popping out of the middle.

The speed at which plants like gorse and blackthorn will die when shaded out is remarkable. Having been impressed when I was told about genuine Nature “Reserves” in Tasmania, that is, places where people were completely excluded, by law, I decided that, even though Argel was quite small, I ought to leave part of it completely alone and just not go there, for a bit at least. So I resisted visiting one corner for a couple of years. I then thought, well, that's not really very long In terms of a tree, so I waited for five years. I had a look from a distance occasionally but thought, well, its still not very long, really, so I left it some more.

I managed eight years before my curiosity got the better of me and I went down to have a nosey with my notebook and pencil, to record whatever wonders I might find. A large part of the corner had been taken over by Blackthorn which had grown layer after layer of branches, such that every cubic inch of the space seemed to have spiky twigs growing through it. It appeared to be a dense, impenetrable, thorny barrier, concealing and protecting whatever lay in its interior.

But the Blackthorn had in turn been over-grown by an oak from an old hedge line and most of it was dead and had been for a few years. To my amazement I found that when I touched it with my pencil, it simply fell to pieces. No need for the Druid's Golden Sickle, armed with just my pencil I was able to open a way into the thicket with ease!

Vera makes a further suggestion regarding Blackthorn, that given say several centuries, the expanding circumference of a thicket could become huge, enclosing many scores of acres of land. Sometimes the perimeter would be breached in some way, allowing herbivores, such as deer, to enter and graze the pasture beneath the trees. As such, it would be relatively simple for humans to block the way in, trapping the animals therein and then hunt them at leisure.

It's only a small step to imagining deliberately making an opening in the surrounding thicket then driving animals in and re-closing the gap. When the local prince wishes to hunt deer with his companions, there's no need to go looking for prey in the wild, for they are already there, in an enclosure that is large enough to feel like the open, a bit like a deer park.

Vera goes on to suggest that the surrounding high walls of the old aristocracy's deer parks may well define the boundaries of what were once linear Blackthorn thickets, expanding ever outwards from perhaps a single tree many centuries ago until their thorny periphery was finally fixed in stone.

So, there we have it, Sgrech Y Coed, Acorns and Blackthorn result in the Sacred Groves of the Druids, Y Gelli. Isn't nature amazing?

Thanks for reading and please feel free to leave comments.

Next time, for a change, fiction! I mentioned previously how my multiple sclerosis meant I could no longer draw well, so my attempts to produce illustrations of what the Cantrefi Newydd might look like were just not good enough. Having had a novel published many years ago, I thought it might be possible to write something that would give people some sort of vision of a possible, positive future, where the Cantrefi Newydd had flourished. I’d always intended space here on Substack for my fiction and it feels like the right time to release at least some of Konsk, (the epic Metafiction, or is it Patafiction?) into the wild.

Fiction will appear in a seperate section of E.S.P. Adapt and I’ll tell you hwo you can subscribe/unsubscribe from each section, so you only get what appeals to you.

Many thanks all. Hwyl! Chris

1. In fact, the root of the word Gelli is Celli but it mutates to Gelli...I have mentioned mutations in Cymraeg before and will go into some detail about them, because they are so remarkable and give the language such a unique aspect...but not here as they are deserving of considerable attention. Moither me in the comments box if you really want to know!

So pronunciation of Gelli; the G is always hard in Cymraeg as in Game. If you've not read my earlier pieces, here's the explanation of LL again.

“Nesta taught us how to pronounce the LL in Cymraeg. First make a hissing sound and notice how your tongue closes off the sides of your mouth and allows the hiss to escape from the front. Now do the opposite, your tongue closing off the front of your mouth and allowing the hiss to escape from the sides. Now make the hiss from the sides and go on to say an L, allowing the sound to escape from the front of your mouth.”

Pronunciation of Cymru (Wales)- C is always hard as in Can. Confusingly, for the English, pronunciation of y and the u are almost the other way round, so something like Cumry...

2. The name Anglesey is often thought to derive from Island or Land of the Angles but its not English at all and is more likely comes from Old Norse; either Ǫngullsey "Hook Island” or Ǫnglisey "Ǫngli's Island". The Norse folk and particularly the Danes controlled Ynys Môn for a time as well as the Isle of Man and much of the coastline of Britain and Ireland, being seafaring people and leaving their own names on headlands, rocks and other landmarks, or rather, seamarks...

3. Pronunciation of sgrech is more or less as its spelt with the ch similar to that in Scots Loch. Its a great onomatopoeic word, that's a word which imitates the sound it signifies, like buzz. Sgrech is very like Screech, which is another Old Norse word.

The oe in Coed is a diphthong, that is, when two vowels create another vowel sound between them. There aren't that many in Cymraeg compared to English. The oe in Coed is similar to the oi in English Oil.

The y in Sgrech Y Coed, is what's called the definite article in English, that is, the. Again, rather confusingly for the English, here its pronounced something like the u in but and sounds similar to the English indefinite article, a...