Why HedgeRoot?
Well there’s a story there. Let’s start at the beginning.
There is a curious tradition attached to the old Gaelic bards. I confess much of it is probably apocryphal – a creation of latter-day Romantics – but I have found it so inspiring I will repeat it.
Once upon a time – and this part is true – the Gaels kept their great tales, their laws, their kingly lineages – all that made them them committed to memory. Or rather, a dedicated bardic class amongst them would do so, and recite these works as occasion demanded.
And here is where the tale takes a romantic turn. The story is that although many of these bards were literate in the common learned Latin of Europe, they refused to commit their own lore to paper. Instead they would laboriously build up all these cultural treasures in their memory.
The reasoning was thus – that the lifeblood of a people is carried in the heart, in the mind – a light passed from person to person and tongue to tongue. Once committed to paper, said the Romantics, that knowledge too easily passed from life, left to molder between the pages of a book on a forgotten shelf.
For a culture to continue then, it must be newly kindled in each generation.
Enter the Hedge Schools.
Here is where the story gets really fun.
The hedge schools were humble places of learning, far removed from the organized colleges of the cities.
The Romantics say they were the remains of bardic colleges, continued in secret as a means of keeping the pre-Romanized order alive in the days of Church suppression. The more prosaic story is that they arose when in turn Catholic teachings were suppressed during the Plantation era. A purely pragmatic soul might even point to the necessity of such a system on a pre-industrialized rocky island, and scoff at any romantic notions of suppressed knowledge.
But for once in these lessons, let us stick to the poetry of it, and think of whispered tales and treasured tradition passed from ear to ear along the hedgerows.
And so – HedgeRoot.
A place where the many pieces of our heritage are gathered, are nurtured, and passed on.
Let’s begin!
