Churn Milk Peg January 21, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
There are few greater pleasures than bringing half- or three-quarter forgotten British bogeys back from the dead. Churn-Milk Peg was a psychotic old dear who would sit in glades of nut trees and smoke a pipe, waiting for children to come along to pick from her trees: ‘churn milk nuts’ were unripe nuts. In as much as we know anything about her we can thank a passing reference in Wright’s Rural Speech. But Beach today has tracked down the original reference from Dixon’s Chronicles and Stories of Craven, up on the edge of the North and West Riding.
The Short Lea Lane (provincially called T’Short lee loin) is connected with our elfin folk-lore, being a favourite haunt of Churn-milk Peg, a being, perhaps, peculiar to Craven. Of her pedigree we know nothing; but as she is connected with the custody of trees and their fruit, she may derive her lineage from the fauns and satyrs of a Roman era. Peg is represented as an old and very ugly hag, with a pipe in her mouth. Her employment is to protect the nuts, when in the pulpy state called churn-milk, from being gathered by naughty children. All she says is: ‘Smoke! smoke a wooden pipe !/ Getting nuts before they’re ripe!’ If this distich does not succeed in scaring the children, then churn-milk Peg ‘tacks em!’ This hobgoblin is known in Malhamdale, where fruit-pilfering children are told to ‘tak care, or Churn-milk Peg will tak ye to t’owd lad!’ i.e., to a certain ‘old gentleman!’ Churnmilk Peg seems to be a boggert [sic] of much the same kind as Jinny Grin-teeth, who is an orchard custodian, in the neighbourhood of Saddleworth.
Jinny Grin-teeth is of course Jenny Greenteeth, though here in an unaccustomed role: she usually drowns children. As for anyone who wants to go on pilgrimage, where is Short Lea Lane
How, for instance, did the Skiptonians [folk of Skipton] reach Rylstone? Some went round by Gargrave and Hetton ; and others turned off at the top of the Skipton Raikes, and passing through the Short Lea Lane, managed, by following horse-paths, carried over undrained swampy pastures, (once the bed of a small lake called Alenwath Tarn), to reach the road from Embsay to None-go-by. (also from Dixon)
Note that the nineteenth-century map (1854) shows Short Lea Lane to be bent: a frequent fact with ‘boggart’ roads.
Anything else on Churn-Milk Peggy: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
PS John Billingsley writes about a stone on Midgeley Moor called Churn Milk Peg where children left coins on top: poor John reached up one day to find that someone had kindly left frogspawn instead of coins.
