Children of to-day may not concern themselves with such things, but long ago it was a seasonal ploy to gather “souracks” and to search for arnuts, which were also called lucy-arnuts, earth-nuts and pig-nuts. They weile dug out of the turfy soil with gully-knives or fingers. They were rather like marble-sized potatoes. Conopodium denudatum is the Latin name for the plant, and it is a member of the hemlock family.

Arnuts were hard and tasteless, but perhaps the effort to gel them made them the more desirable, like the inside of thistles, painfully deprived of their prickles.

In those days children esteemed other things of a like nature, the soft end of rushes, the sweet flowers of the clover, “birch beer” caught in a tin below a “spale” cut in the silvery bark, young larch twig points and the resin itself, when soft and clear it was very aromatic and had a fine clean taste.

But children’s ploys and toys are many and various, and to deal with them adequately (as with folk-lore in general) a writer would need plenty of ink and plenty of time. Even then, as William Soutar says:

Lang, lang, or the makin were ended
His rowth o’ years were by;
And a’ the hills wud be midden-heaps,
And a’ the burns dry.

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