Saining the House

On New Year's morning in parts of the Scottish Highlands, protecting the house could involve rather more than locking the door.

Water might be carried through the rooms and sprinkled over beds, doorways and the people still inside them. Afterwards, doors and windows were shut, gaps were stopped up and dried juniper branches were burned until smoke filled the house. The cattle and their byre could receive the same treatment before everything was finally opened again and the cold January air allowed back in.

One nineteenth-century description records the occupants coughing, sneezing and wheezing while the person conducting the fumigation continued until the smoke was judged sufficient. Whisky followed afterwards, which feels like a reasonable arrangement once everyone had survived the protection.

This was one form of saining, a Scots word used for blessing or protecting a person, animal, building or possession. It did not describe one fixed ceremony carried out identically across Scotland. Water, smoke, plants, spoken blessings and Christian signs could all form part of it, depending on where you were and what needed protecting.

The details changed, but the purpose remained fairly easy to recognise. Something mattered, something could go wrong, and people wanted every available form of protection on their side.

NEW YEAR WAS A GOOD TIME TO BE CAREFUL

John Gregorson Campbell, who collected traditions from the Highlands and Islands during the nineteenth century, described New Year's Day as one of the great saining days, along with the opening days of the traditional quarters of the year. These were moments when precautions were taken against harm reaching cattle, houses and the people who depended upon them.

The timing fits a pattern that has appeared throughout this shelf. Protective customs repeatedly gather around change. Doorways mattered because they sat between outside and inside, death customs surrounded the movement from life into whatever people believed came next, and a new year created another uncertain boundary. The old one was finished, but nobody knew what the next twelve months would bring.

For a household dependent upon livestock, crops, weather and health, that uncertainty was practical as well as spiritual. A sick cow or failed harvest could affect the whole family, so beginning the year by protecting the house and animals probably felt less like unnecessary superstition and more like taking sensible precautions within the world as they understood it.

WATER CAME BEFORE THE SMOKE

One elaborate Highland New Year custom involved water taken from what was known as a dead and living ford, a crossing used both by funeral processions and by people going about ordinary daily life.

The person collecting it was expected to remain silent and keep the vessel from touching the ground. On New Year's morning, members of the household drank some of the water before the rest was sprinkled through the house and over the people inside. The water was believed to offer protection against witchcraft, the evil eye and other harmful influences during the year ahead.

The ritual was very particular about how the water was obtained. It had to come from the correct place and be collected in the correct manner, which is something we keep finding with folk protection: the action mattered, but doing it properly mattered too.

Once the sprinkling was finished, the juniper was brought in.

Juniper had a strong protective reputation in Highland tradition, and Thomas Pennant recorded Highlanders burning it before cattle on New Year's Day during his travels in Scotland in the eighteenth century. Later descriptions preserve a more thorough household version in which branches were dried beforehand and then burned inside the closed house until smoke filled the rooms.

This was not a gentle waft of something pleasantly herbal around the fireplace. Doors and windows were deliberately kept shut while the smoke thickened, and the people inside remained there until the fumigation had done its work. The animals could then be treated as well, because protecting the family while ignoring the cattle would have made very little sense to a household whose food and income depended upon them.

A cow meant milk, calves and money, and an unexplained illness in the byre could become a serious problem very quickly. If people believed misfortune might have supernatural causes as well as physical ones, feeding, sheltering and saining the animals could all belong to the same system of care.

SAINING WAS MUCH BIGGER THAN JUNIPER

The Hogmanay smoke ritual is memorable enough that it can make saining sound as though it was simply the Scottish practice of burning juniper, but the word covered a much wider range of protective actions.

Older Scots examples use sain for blessing and protecting people, homes, boats and possessions, often through Christian signs such as the cross. Later folklore records the same word being used for practices intended to protect against harmful influences or bad luck.

That history is useful because it stops us trying to force these customs into a neat choice between Christianity and folk magic. Somebody could invoke Christ, Mary or a saint while also using rowan, water or smoke without experiencing any contradiction at all. The categories that look separate to us could sit comfortably together for the people performing the ritual.

Alexander Carmichael's Carmina Gadelica, compiled largely from Gaelic oral material collected in the Highlands and Islands during the nineteenth century, preserves prayers and blessings concerned with almost every part of ordinary life. There are blessings for cattle, milking, journeys, sleep, work and houses, including one that asks for protection across the whole structure of the home, from its foundations and walls to its beams and roof.

I love the thoroughness of that because nobody is blessing the sitting room and hoping for the best upstairs. The entire house is treated as something worth protecting because it shelters the people, animals, food and possessions inside it.

It also gives us an interesting comparison with the protective marks we looked at earlier. A daisy wheel might be scratched beside a doorway or hearth where danger was thought most likely to enter, while a spoken blessing could encompass the whole building. The method was different, but the request was much the same: keep harm away from here.

Carmichael's collection does need to be handled carefully because comparison with his field notebooks has shown that he sometimes polished or rearranged the oral material before publication. That does not make the collection useless, but it does mean we should treat it as recorded tradition rather than assume every printed line is an exact transcript of what somebody originally said.

ROWAN, CIRCLES AND DOING THINGS THE RIGHT WAY

Juniper was not the only plant associated with protection. Rowan had one of the strongest protective reputations in Scottish folklore and could be placed around homes, byres or animals as a safeguard against harmful influences. Campbell recorded rowan being used alongside other protective customs, sometimes combined with red thread.

There is no need to find one original explanation for every use of the tree. By the time folklorists were recording these traditions, rowan had already been associated with protection for generations, and customs do not always survive because everyone remembers the first reason behind them. Sometimes your family has always put rowan near the house, so the rowan stays there.

I also have a rowan at the entrance to mine, and after researching this shelf I see absolutely no reason to interfere with an arrangement that has caused me no difficulty so far.

Movement could matter too. Deiseal, or deasil, means moving sunwise, in the apparent direction of the sun, and Scottish and Gaelic traditions repeatedly associate that direction with blessing and good fortune. Some rites required three circuits, which takes us back to the clootie well at Culloden and confirms that the number three is going to follow us around whether we invite it or not.

There is no single explanation for every sunwise movement or every use of three. Christian symbolism, inherited custom and older associations with the sun may all have contributed at different periods. What matters is that some ritual actions had a recognised correct direction, and people knew the difference between simply walking around something and doing it properly.

SAINING APPEARED WHEN SOMETHING IMPORTANT WAS CHANGING

New Year provides the most dramatic household example, but saining was not confined to Hogmanay. Protective rites appear around childbirth, livestock, seasonal quarter days, journeys, boats and suspected witchcraft. A seventeenth-century Orkney account, for example, describes houses and boats being sained at Hallowe'en, including crosses made with tar.

Again, the interesting part is when these practices appear. A child is born, animals calve, a boat leaves shore, the seasons turn or a new year begins. These are points when something important is happening and the outcome is not entirely within human control.

Ritual did not remove that uncertainty, but it gave people another action they could take. That idea has been underneath almost everything on this shelf, from witch bottles and concealed shoes to clootie wells and mourning customs. When something mattered and people could not guarantee the outcome, they did what they could and then added another layer of protection.

THE HOUSE HAD TO START THE YEAR PROPERLY

What I like most about the New Year version of saining is that it was not responding to one specific disaster. It was preparation for whatever came next.

The old year had ended, nobody knew what the next one would contain, and before ordinary life resumed the household protected what mattered. Water moved through the rooms, smoke filled the house and byre, plants associated with protection were brought into the space and words were spoken over the people, animals and building.

I would not recommend recreating the fumigation. Closing every window in a modern house and burning enough juniper to make everybody cough is one historical experience we can safely admire from a distance.

The instinct underneath it is much easier to understand.

Before we go any further, look after this place, the people inside it and the animals we depend upon. Keep illness, bad luck and whatever else might be coming as far away as possible.

Once that had been done, the doors could open again and the year could begin.