A few years ago, at the non dancing celidih at the Rothbury Music Festival, someone played a tune called "The Coquet Lass". Does anyone know who it was, who wrote it, and does anyone have either a recording or the dots for it?
Never heard of it.
And I never heard the end of the story of the Felton Were-Rabbit; you must tell us!
I was on holiday in NZ last year (before i emigrated) and news of the Felton Were Rabbit had a full page spread in the herald. It was run over, was it not??
there was also a giant rabbit stolen from a garden centre in a wheelbarrow not far from there, in ashington. It escaped and is still loose and rampaging around northumberland’s pit villages according to my grandma…
sorry, no idea about the tune, but i have heard the name before…
So there’s another one on the loose!
This is getting like "Jaws"…
I saw the blinking thing in the field in front of my old house, no kidding, it was a MONSTER!
There is a Hexamshire Lass, a Coquet Light (not Slockit) and Bonnie Cragside features the Coquet, but I’ve not come across this one.
Does the Felton Were-Rabbit have a great big head and great big gob and great big goggley eyes?
If it has, it has also been seen in the Penshaw vicinity.
I tell a lie, when I checked, it isn’t "Coket Light", its Coket Side (near Cragside, one would guess) and I have posted the tune out of Berwicks collection.
There is a Coket Island on the Northumbrian coast, which might have a Coket Light, so it might still be true.
Tom Carruthers wrote a Coquetdale Hornpipe, so I also suspect that the K has turned into a QU over the last 200 years.
Foster Charlton wrote a Coquetdale Waltz which (like Bonnie Cragside), may have words.
No, Geoff, that was me.
There’s also a clutch of songs written in praise of the Coquet by / for a group of anglers who would travel up from Durham and Newcastle to fish it in Victorian times, often staying in the inn at Weldon Bridge. The chief rhymester was a Mr. Roxby, and existing tunes were specified for these songs to be sung to.
We played "hexhamshire lass" at the schools ceilidh band day at the sage. Ian taught us it, i think…
I should have said, the angling songs were nineteenth century - at least some of them were written before Victoria came to the throne, and I think some time before the Victorian gentlemen I mentioned started their fishing trips to the Coquet.