Have you done any good orracking lately?

Voices from the pastIn the mid-1960's, a research team from Leeds university carried out a major project to produce the Survey of English Dialects. The results of this survey have recently been transferred to the British Library and some of the results are available online.

Audlem happened to be one of the villages which the research team selected for their investigations. Perhaps not surprisingly many of the unusual words recorded related to somewhat down-to-earth farming activities.

So the following selection of words were recorded in Audlem sometime in the mid-1960's – does anybody still use them 40 or so years later?

word	meaning
orrack	break up cow dung with a fork
pan shovel	muck fork
chawl	lower jaw of a pig
gambrel	instrument to stretch the legs of a pig's carcase
cambrel	butcher's nail
boozy pasture	field closest to farm buildings
pothery	close or stuffy

The British Library also has some voice recordings from the Survey, and one of them is of an Audlem cowman in 1966. This gentleman was born in 1890 and the only clue to his identity is the initials HG – does anyone know who this might have been?

Click here to access the British Library website for this item and listen to the recording.
To hear the audio, you need Windows Media Player installed on your computer.

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