Looking for the dobby stone

 A couple of days ago, the Deeside Field Club appeared in this concatenation of notes. I think the Notional Research Group for Cultural Artefacts might be a descendant of those old field clubs.

In one of the group’s publications, I learned about dobby stones and haining stones.

Dobbies were among the United Kingdom’s many household or farmstead spirits. Every place had one or two: fairies, brownies, boggarts and their kin.

Dobbies were mostly Northern folk, often found in Cumbria. They were prone to mischief and famous for annoying milkmaids but were fond of milk and cream. So farmers set up dobby stones, stones with a natural bowl or indentation — like a small birdbath. Whoever did the milking would leave a taste in the stone as an offering to the dobby.

Haining stones are harder to sort out. They were found on sheep and cattle farms. The word “hain” was used to refer to land set aside for the local spirits. The fairies and their kin were said to live in the tall grass beyond the cultivated land — or perhaps on the border, in the last sheaf of grain. (In common practice, the last sheaf was not consumed but offered to the spirits, who got the benefit of the doubt.)

Haining stones came in two varieties: large field stones like the dobby stones and smaller hand stones. One theory is that the offering was put on the field stone, and the hand-held stone was then used to pound the larger stone, calling the local genius to dinner.

I’m interested in field clubs and notional research groups because I’m interested in places. I’m mainly interested in the natural history of a place. But humans are a part of the natural history, and I’d be hard pressed to say where natural history stops and folklore starts.

• Sources and notes: Notional Research Group for Cultural Artefacts, Supplement One, Haining Stones, 2016. It’s here:

https://nrgca.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/nrgca-haining-stones.pdf

I found out about the Deeside Field Club from Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016. That’s where I also found out about Richard Skelton and his wife, Autumn Richardson, who led me to their Notional Research Group.

Today, we’re tempted to think that dobbies were the creations of ancient peoples. But farmers were leaving milk in dobby stones in the 1920s. My father was a boy then, and the stories he heard in the American South were similar to those told in Cumbria.