Reviews
Artist:Briar & Bramble Album: Rum Tales
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 5
Website: https://www.miketurnbull.bandcamp.com/album/rum-tales-2/
A contemporary folk duo (though which is which I couldn't say) composed of guitarist Mike Turnbull and Kate Hewson on mandolin and shruti box, this EP comprises a clutch of songs inspired by Cumbrian tales and legends in his native Lakes. It opens with 'Flashing Lane' a friskily picked stomper based around the annual gathering of Gypsies and Travellers at Appleby Horse Fair in Westmorland, the title referring to the name given the road down which they race their horses to attract potential buyers.
Rooted in 18th century history, the mandolin-driven 'Betsy Jane' recounts the story of the ill-fated slave ship (not to be confused with another such ship called Betsey from Liverpool) which, laden with ivory and gold, struck a rock and sank while trying to make Whitehaven harbor (history has, however, no record of slaves ever being landed there) with its ghost - if ships have ghosts - reputed to be seen at sea every Christmas trying to make port.
Again featuring mandolin, 'Crimson Banners' is adapted from a poem by local writer and walker Julie Carter about a spectral army of mounted troops and infantry column (the crimson banner was a gesture of defiance in the Jacobite uprising) supposedly witnessed marching for an hour on Souther Fell in Mungrisdale by a farm worker on Midsummer's-Eve 1735, the force apparently also reappearing in 1738, witnessed by local farmer William Lancaster and again, on the same day, in 1745 by over 26 people, this time the army also having carriages, and covering an area of about half a mile, the haunting reported in The Gentlemans' Magazine in 1747 and the subject of a 2011 book by Stephen Matthews.
A slower track, as you might imagine, the title song has a smuggling backdrop, inspired by a group of smugglers at Maryport, a member of the clergy among them, who hid in a cave from the excise men, surviving for three days on their bounty of butter, sugar, spices and rum. It ends with fingerpicked and shruti flavoured 'Burnt Horse Ridge', the title a reference to a walking area ridge on Skiddaw mountain in the Lakes, its name possibly deriving from a misspelling of Brunt House in Bowness-on-Windermere, the song populated by fells imagery of streams wind and rushes, and pointing out the lack of any evidence of equines, burnt or otherwise.
Mike Davies
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