Ogham Tree Alphabet November 25th to the Solstice and Saturday Fail

 The tree I've not mentioned with regard to The Ogham Tree Alphabet is the Elder. If you've not come across the Ogham Tree Alphabet then this below is from my first post about it in 2020 explaining what it is.

The Ogham Alphabet is the only native British writing system devised over 2,000 years ago and carved using notches onto wood or stone.
I had heard of this way of writing from the Sister Fidelma Books by Peter Tremayne -the first few of these I read years ago before they became very repetitive.

It turns out that in the Ogham Alphabet each letter is also a tree and a number and part of the calendar or actually the other way round..........each tree is a letter and number and a month or day of the year.
Karen Cater (Author of this book below)

set out to find, in her local area, each tree of the calendar, illustrate them all and find out more about the history, traditions and folklore surrounding the trees.

I have been taking photos of the trees in the book and writing about the Alphabet off and on since 2020 but although I've written about Elder trees I've not shown the Elder photo and relevance from the book for this period of the year. 

Rather than re-write about all the wonderful properties of Elder and the way it keeps away witches! here is a link to all the posts that I've written about it over the last 6 years

Sadly there are very few Elder trees around the village and the one over the road at the edge of the burial ground has been 'tidied' by the Community Payback team(people doing Community Service instead of prison) who have been working there every Saturday morning with their strimmers and mowers for the last two years ...driving me crazy and ruining the habitat for many creatures in the process!

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 Saturday's visits to Christmas Fayres cost me nothing except diesel and 1 hour of wasted time! I started at one that opened at 10am in Eye where I could also pop in the library to return a couple of books that had people waiting. There were a few stalls in the Town Hall but nothing very exciting. Then I went home via two villages where I should have found 3 sales - in the first village the fayre must have been cancelled, in the second village I looked round quickly hoping to get a jar of Lemon and Lime marmalade from a local producer but they didn't have any and their second sale didn't start until much later - I must have misread their times.

I was soon home again out of the windy weather!

Back Soon

Sue