Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

Continuing with my nettle theme we all know one of the common treatments for nettle-stings – a dock or docken leave, whose cooling juices soothed in principle the worst ravages of nettle-stings – but never seemed to eradicate the pain. Dock-leaves belong botanically to the rumex family. This also includes the common sorrel, often made into a pleasant soup on continental Europe, as well as forming a key ingredient in tart sauce served with salmon in Belturbet’s Rendez-vous restaurant.

Who of us in our lives hasn’t been stung? No, I’m not talking about involvement in a love-affair that has gone tits up, or being caught in a dodgy pyramid scheme, but rather that burning pain that you get on your hands and legs when you fall into long grass and which shows that your body has been penetrated by the horrible little spines of the common stinging nettle.

These beasts can grow up to six feet high. Personally I detest them; they represent decay and rankness. You find them in great abundance in unkempt graveyards and so I believe they are the last, ultimate floral wreath for the dead therein, coming up when all the other flowers have decayed and those interred have been forgotten by friends and family alike.

But my disdain for nettles has never been shared by herbalists. As I have mentioned in my most recent Echoes of the Past in the Cavan Echo an infusion has long been taken against skin rashes. Seventeenth-century herbalist Nicholas Culpeper was loud in his prasies of them. He said that they were governed by the Planet Mars. As medical knowledge in his day was still governed by the classical idea of the bodily humours he said that nettles, as Martian plants, had to share the Martian aspect of being hot and dry. They were a perfect foil for wet and damp conditions “and the superfluities thereunto attaching”, so they were just the job in springtime. There was nothing they couldn’t cure. What’s more he advocated drinking them with wine, a risky piece3 of advice, given that he was writing during the years of Cromwell’s Commonwealth and when the Lord Protector and his agents took a dim view on alcohol. One thing he did not consider them useful for, and indeed he denounced the idea of them “promoting venery in men” ie giving lads the horn, as completely erroneous.

Nettles are delicious food. We picked some last spring on Turbet Island. Rosie froze them and still has a supplyy which she’s going to make into a delicious quiche – which will be eaten by one very real man!