nated in the particular area in question but subsequently failed to spread
much more widely, perhaps as a result of poor communications? Or are they
the relics of once much more general uses that, through the accidents of time,
have chanced to survive only peripherally?
Wales seems to owe its distinctiveness in part to a tradition of herb culti-
vation in which there has been a strong preference for certain introduced
species at the expense of native ones. Only that could explain why the alien
Artemisia absinthium (wormwood) has been found in use there so exception-
ally widely and for a markedly greater variety of ailments than elsewhere—
and why another foreign import, more strictly confined to gardens,Tanace-
tum parthenium (Linnaeus) Schultz ‘Bipontinus’ (feverfew), has attracted
folk applications there, too, that are sharply different from those recorded
for it elsewhere in Britain and in Ireland. The Welsh, though, are hardly likely
to have taken into cultivation the unquestionably indigenous Menyanthes
trifoliata (bogbean), that favourite bitter of the entire ‘Celtic fringe’, and some
other explanation is needed to account for their esteeming that for rheuma-
tism to a particularly wide extent while showing a singular lack of interest in
it as a tonic and digestive in marked contrast to their fellow ‘Celts’ elsewhere
in the British Isles.
A particularly suggestive distribution pattern is to be found among the
many records and uses ofUmbilicus rupestris(navelwort), a common and very
widespread plant of western Britain and Ireland. Only in the south-eastern
corner of the latter and in the south-western corner of Wales, directly oppo-
site, does that appear to have been recorded as supplying a treatment for chil-
blains. In those same two areas, but some way beyond them as well, the plant
has served as a corn cure, too. It is tempting to look to the Irish settlement of
Dyfed in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. as the explanation in this case.
Inthe same way it is tempting to ascribe to past Norse influence a number
of herbal practices for which records have been traced only—and otherwise
inexplicably—from areas where that influence is known to have been partic-
ularly long-lasting and pronounced. Apparently in the Hebrides and Shetland
alone has Allium ursinum (ramsons) been brought to bear on urinary-cum-
kidney troubles; only from the Hebrides and the Isle of Man have records
emerged for the application of one or more species ofEquisetum (horsetails)
to bleeding; only in Orkney and the Outer Hebridean island of South Uist
does that near-ubiquitous decorator of maritime turf,Armeria maritima
(thrift), appear to have had a herbal role at all. Similarly, it seems to have been
only in the Isle of Man, Orkney, Shetland and (even more tellingly) the Faeroe
Distribution Patterns 341