I have something to celebrate this year – for the first time, I’ve been able to gather hazelnuts from the trees in the garden! All are native hazels, mostly tucked in the hedges, and the nuts are smaller that the commercial ones, but delicious, free, and no food miles.

Gathering the nuts got me thinking about them. Hazels were among the earliest recolonisers here after the last Ice Age, and hazelnuts have been an important part of the human diet in this country since the Mesolithic. You can store them without processing, each comes in its own protective wrapper, they’re high in protein and oil, and they will last up to a year if kept dry and in their shells. A good store of hazelnuts for the winter months was insurance against starvation, when other food might be hard to obtain for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Nuts were easily carried as a travelling snack, witnessed by the frequent hazelnut shells we found along the Sweet Track Neolithic pathway in Somerset during excavation, and continued to be favoured through history. Excavations at the Shakespearean theatre The Swan in London revealed layers of hazelnut shells where the groundlings stood to watch the plays – mediaeval popcorn, perhaps.

Hazels feature in mythology, magic and folklore too. In Irish legend, nine hazel trees surrounded the well of life. The nuts that fell in the water were believed to bring wisdom, and those who ate them became seers and poets. According to the tale, a salmon ate the nuts, and a druid, desiring its wisdom, caught the fish and told his apprentice to cook it, with the strict instruction not to eat any of it. However, when a bit of the cooking juice splashed the boy’s thumb, he stuck it in his mouth to cool it, thereby gaining the wisdom for himself.

Other magical properties of hazel included divination – a forked branch cut between sunset and sunrise on a new moon makes a dowsing rod to detect underground water. Carrying a hazel stick could protect you against evil, witches and bad spirits when walking by night. Driving three hazel pins into the wall of your house protects it from fire. Stirring your jam with a hazel stick stops fairies from stealing it. If you carry a hazel rod, a fathom and a half long, with a green hazel twig pushed into it, you become invisible… A fathom is six feet. Try this one in Shrewsbury covered market on a Saturday and see if it works!

But back to the hazelnuts. Carrying a hazelnut in your pocket was a sovereign way to avoid the onset of rheumatism, and if you were lucky enough to find a double nut, keeping that in your pocket would both bring good luck and protect against witches and toothache. When I was a child, a Hallowe’en tradition was for young couples to roast two hazelnuts over the fire. If they burned steadily and peacefully the relationship would be good, if they flew apart and/or exploded it was time to think again! Alternatively, unattached lasses could divine their future husband by giving each nut the name of a potential suitor and the casting them into the fire. Whichever nut produced the loudest bang or brightest flame was the one to go for.

Clearly then, hazelnuts have much more going for them than a tasty snack. If you go out to pick some though, bear in mind that it was believed that if girls gathered nuts on a Sunday they would meet the Devil. ‘Carry your basket Ma’am?’