34 Geographical Areas
‘Ulster’ has been used in the records loosely and variously. All or just a
part or parts of that Irish province may be meant, or it may be shorthand for
just the six counties that constitute the U.K. portion. For this reason, unless
the province is clearly intended, that word is placed in quotation marks
throughout the book.
GEOGRAPHICAL ORDER OF RECORDS
In the case of that majority of plants with entries containing records from
both Britain and Ireland, normally the British records are cited en bloc first
and approximately from south to north in turn. The Irish ones are normally
grouped together in a separate paragraph and are cited in reverse order, from
north to south, to reflect that island’s greater proximity to Scotland and the
marked cultural affinities between the two. Overall, the order is thus spirally
anticlockwise.
The separation of the Irish records makes it possible to tell at a glance
which of the two islands has yielded the greater range of recorded uses traced
(though not necessarily the greater volume of use, an aspect on which, as on
all quantitative ones, little information exists or can safely be deduced). The
separation also serves as a reminder of the limited comparability of the Irish
and the British records by reason of the much greater completeness of the
Irish ones geographically. A further justification is the substantial degree of
autonomy that Irish folk medicine seems to have enjoyed, a matter discussed
in more detail in Chapter 17.
Records
Any statement, published or unpublished, regarding a use for one of the pur-
poses with whichMedicinal Plants in Folk Tradition: An Ethnobotany of Britain
& Ireland is concerned is treated as ‘a record’. A reference is given for the
source of each, individually cited in the text as a number referring to the Notes
at the end of that chapter, and to a particular page in cases where the state-
ment could otherwise be found only with difficulty. There is much unac-
knowledged repetition of records in the literature and in such cases only the
original source is given in so far as that has proved traceable; in surprisingly
few instances seemingly independent records have been found for a particu-
lar use in a particular area, in which case references to clearly different sources
appear against the same number.