Book review: Gathering Days, by Ellie Evelyn Orrell

Gaynor Funnell

‘Sometimes old traditions are thrown up like dust along a summer road. You glimpse them briefly in the sunbeams…’

This quiet, yet profound book, and one I took great pleasure in reading, is a collection of such moments and memories, unearthed while walking along familiar paths, inside the home, from childhood happenings, all gathered from Wales and elsewhere.

Such memories appearing ‘like sunlight seeing an opportunity through a break in the clouds and pouring in through an open window.’

We learn that the writer has returned to live in her parent’s home after a period of living away, ‘looking for a meaning in a time that felt devoid of it…’

It isn’t until the last pages that we find out the meaning behind the title, although we may have gleaned a similar meaning by ourselves by then. Summer solstice was when the Gathering Day occurred, a day when the Druids collected herbs, flowers, honey, and mistletoe cut with a golden scythe, with the belief that the magical properties of these being particularly strong at this time of the year.

‘…I find myself drawn to the ways in which each season can offer the chance of a new beginning.’ Orrell writes.

Although divided into the four seasons, Gathering Days can be picked up and read at will, each piece being a story in itself, some only a page or paragraph long, all with self-explanatory titles such as Daffodils; Snow; On Climbing a Hill.

Reading through the seasons offers the reader a reminder of the plants, flowers, and fruit which appear at such times, alongside the delight of finding such seasonal food, something which is easy to forget in this time of supermarket shopping, where we can buy most of these things all the year round.

Foraging and recipes – not just of food – are a link to places as much as the seasons are; making Seville marmalade in Spain; laver bread being a link to Wales when the author is no longer there, the eating of which being ‘…a demonstration of Welshness outside of Wales.’

Alongside the more familiar recipes such as blackberry jam, and leek and potato soup, there are things I didn’t realise there were recipes for, such as acorn dye, and gorse flower tea, ‘that tastes of almonds and coconut’, something I plan to make myself.

This is not a cookery book, however, the recipes are brief and incidental, more of an exploration of how familiar things collected while walking can be transformed into something else. And how food gathering can be a link between past and present, triggering memories of those who have walked before us.

While blackberry picking the author writes, ‘With purple tongue and purple hand, I feel as if I’ve seamlessly woven myself into a practise that is both personal and ancient.’

In the same chapter, she also describes how she herself might emulate the ‘dependable’ blackberry, a plant able to put down roots and shoots and cover large areas of ground, if she could ‘anchor’ herself to a place for long enough.

Paths and walking criss-cross the pages, a return to once familiar paths which carry reminders of times past, as well as offering new things to be found and new paths to be made, an awareness that will resonate with many of us, ‘Walking the same path each day can be an enlightening experience. After treading it several times, you come to realise that it was never really the same path after all.’

Home, and all what that can mean, also walks through the pages, the feeling that home is not just a house but can also include the shifting boundaries of the area surrounding it, the lanes, the fields, the neighbours, a place where you feel you belong, ‘…its presence becoming more obvious in absence…’

How to belong to a place, and how a place can belong to you was my overarching feeling when I finished Gathering Days.

That connection, and re-connection, with a place can come in many forms, and can be enhanced by walking the landscape, gathering berries and fruit, acknowledging the change in seasons, all reinforcing the link between place and each of us. Where our feeling of home might be, and how the past can entwine with the present almost seamlessly. How we can all slow down, and gain inspiration from the everyday things that surround us.

Gathering Days is published by Calon, an imprint of University of Wales Press, and can be purchased here and at all good bookshops.

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