Bog Myrtle & Peat

I heard about a dead horse from a friend. He’d been walking on the beach and followed his nose to the corpse where it lay at the foot of steep cliffs. At first he had wondered if it had been washed up there, but even when I found the wreckage strewn around the rocks, it seemed just as likely that the animal had fallen all of seventy feet down to a gap on the strand. Whatever the explanation, the creature was finally and catastrophically dead – and it had been that way for some time.

Horse heads were frightening long before Mario Puzo thought of stuffing them down beds – the skulls described by the poet Vernon Watkins are terrifying because they belong to a far more ancient and obscure tradition; the sheet-strewn hobby horse and the Mari Lwyd with staring eyes and gaping, grinning teeth. It’s hard to get hold of Watkins’ The Ballad of the Mari Lwyd nowadays, but everybody should make the effort because the ground swims around those words – particularly at Christmas, when the ritual is at its most powerful. As I gather pace towards horses in both literal and imaginative terms, nothing has felt more immediate and shocking than Watkins’ images of skulls in the frost and starlight.

Responding to that poem, I made a man-sized Mari Lwyd puppet to frighten my son at Hallowe’en – but I had to substitute the horse’s head for the skull of a galloway bull. The effect was unnerving, but a cow’s mouth is all the wrong shape for this game. Unlike horses, cows don’t have front teeth on their upper jaws – the effect of my Mari Lwyd is weakened because only a horse’s skull can reach out to bite you with sufficient wickedness – and when a horse’s jaws are snapped open and shut, the teeth go “clink” in the middle. My bull’s head just clops emptily. What I made was an aberration – and everybody agreed that they were glad when I put it away. I took that as a ringing endorsement, but I was doomed to fail because only a horse skull can scratch that itch.

When I heard that a horse was lying dead below the sea cliffs, it seemed like the time had come to get my hands on a skull of my own – and to be sure, it wasn’t very hard to find the corpse where it lay beneath wracks of sea pinks and campion. The body was almost clean of meat, lying on its back with its rear legs splayed like the arms of a swastika. Deep mats of black and white hair had settled on the underlying cobbles, and while the hooves had dried into coconut shells, they were still attached to the bones of the feet.

Part eaten-out and part desiccated, the skeleton was spattered with raven lime and the sinister turds of foxes. It was an object of strange fascination – and if I have sometimes been startled by the experience of working with dead cows and pigs, this animal had a different texture. I don’t know much about horses yet, but they seem more intimately human than other farmyard friends. In strangely connected ways, there was nothing of a human body in that massive wreck of ribs and starwise vertebrae – but there was an odd solemnity there – and a sense that you or I would come apart along similar seams.

Maddeningly, the skull itself was nowhere to be found. Every yellowed bone was preserved in odourless perfection, but the jaw was some distance away and the head was altogether gone. Something had dragged it away, and it required a fair measure of legwork to overcome my disappointment. I did find an equilibrium in the end, and now I am calm enough to feel consoled by the hope that when I finally find a horse skull of my own, it will be even better than the one I missed this time.

I couldn’t go home empty-handed. A strange atmosphere hung over that skeleton, and I was suddenly struck by the knowledge that humans have always paid specific and peculiar attention to the bodies of horses. Having only recently returned from Kazakhstan and the Great Eurasian Steppe, it fascinates me that futures and fortunes were readily inferred from the reading of equine bones – and buried in the horseback poetry of Ferenc Juhász, I can’t ignore the Hungarian táltos tradition and the gift of second-sight. So I took the shoulder blades from that busted horse’s skeleton, knowing that the ancient shamans often prized these bones above all others for rites of divination. It’s not a thing I’d ever hope to do or recreate myself – but surely there is something to learn from being near these things.

It’s also true that while the act of using shoulder-blades to tell the future (a process called “scapulimancy”) seems to belong to strange and foreign traditions, there is good evidence to suggest that similar observances once held power in Scotland. More pressingly, if it seems daft that good fortune could ever hang on the ritualised treatment of an animal’s anatomy, have you never wondered why chickens have a wishbone?

(Picture is a Welsh Mari Lwyd – 1920)