Kendal historian Peter Home describes some charms against cattle diseases that were used by county dwellers in times gone by

A GENTLEMAN farmer, having some cattle affected by the 'foul', a word used in the 1800s to describe a range of horse, sheep and cattle diseases, heard that an old man in the neighbourhood, who had long practised farriery, was famous for curing the disease and went to consult him.

The case was duly laid before the old man. His directions were few and simple; the owner of the horse was to go at midnight into his orchard and cut a turf at the foot of the largest apple tree therein and then hang it carefully on the topmost bough of the tree, all in silence and alone.

The turf cut must be one on which the beast had trodden with its diseased foot. If this was duly performed, as the turf moldered away, so would the disease gradually leave the animal. The old farrier added that he had never known this mode of cure to fail.

A murrain is an old-fashioned word for various contagious diseases among cattle and sheep in the mid 1800s. The custom of 'need fires' was thought by the villagers to be the best cure.

The 'fire' was produced by rubbing two pieces of dry wood together and was then carried from place to place through the district as a charm against the cattle being infected.

Bonfires were kindled with 'the fire' and the cattle were driven through the smoke. For whatever reason the 'cure' seemed to have worked

A visitor to the area around the same time observed a sort of rigging attached to the chimney of a farmhouse and asked what it meant. The farmer’s wife told him that they had experienced great difficulty that year in rearing their calves; the poor little creatures all died off, so that they had taken the leg and thigh of one of the dead calves and hung it in a chimney by a rope, since which they had not lost another calf.

A farmer’s widow on Westmorland’s borders had a cow which was taken ill. She was told to go to the church minister which she did and asked him to come and say a prayer over the animal.

He came and laid his hand on the beast’s shoulder and said: “If you live, you live and if you die you die” and, according to the widow, the cow’s health improved from that moment on.

The following year the minister was taken ill and the widow hearing this went to visit him.

She found him in bed very ill, so she put her hand on his shoulder and said: “If you live you live, if you die you die.”

At that the minister burst out laughing and his throat got better from that moment on. The man was suffering from Quinsy, a serious throat infection, which broke from the effort of laughing.