Up on a hill in Cornwall, beside the road from Redruth to Lanner, there’s an ancient pagan well called Figgy Dowdy’s Well. It has a beehive stone roof and steps down to clear water, and used to be a favourite place for little girls to christen their dolls on Good Friday. The iron gate is kept locked to stop people falling down it, but the old rhyme suggests that it used to be locked in earlier days, for a different reason:
Figgy Dowdy had a well
On the top of Carn Marth Hill
And she locked it night and day
Lest they took her water away
She was also known by other names – Maggy Figgy, and Margery Daw – but ‘Daw’ means ‘sluttish’, so all names probably refer to a slovenly-looking woman.
In Nelson’s navy, Figgy Dowdy was the name given to a pudding, whose making was eloquently described in a captain’s table dinner scene in Patrick O’Brian’s novel Post Captain:
‘We take ship’s biscuit, put it in a stout canvas bag –’ said Jack.
‘Pound it with a marlin-spike for half an hour –’ said Pullings.
‘Add bits of pork fat, plums, figs, rum, currants,’ said Parker.
‘Send it to the galley, and serve it up with bosun’s grog,’ said Macdonald.
Alaskans, who still eat Pilot Bread made to the original English Navy recipe, will understand why it was necessary to pound the stuff for half an hour to break it up before mixing it with the other ingredients. What the conversation reproduced above doesn’t say is what the ship’s cook did with it – he wrapped it tightly in muslin and boiled it for a few hours.
Modern English and American recipes tend to use beef suet rather than the fat rendered on board from salt pork, but people in my part of France would have no trouble with the old recipe. Some of them still take advantage of the regulations that allow them to slaughter the family pig at home as long as they aren’t going to sell it to strangers, and the local supermarket always has 10Kg bags of salt for sale in the pig-slaughtering season.
If you don’t live in Alaska and you’d like to make your own hardtack (ship’s biscuit), try Mrs Beeton’s recipe:
1 lb Flour
2 oz Butter
1/2 Pint Skimmed Milk
Melt the butter in the milk, mix with the flour until smooth; roll it out thin, cut into circles, pierce all over with a fork, bake 6-10 minutes. (She didn’t have a thermostat on her oven – bake it rock hard, but don’t burn it.)
If you want to make the biscuits look really authentic, stamp them with a broad arrow (like the old prison clothes) and the letters RC (for the Royal Clarence victualling yard in Gosport).
Carn Marth in Cornish means Marks cairn or litteraly translated “pile of stones”. This is all guess work but I think Figgy Dowdy is probably a mutation of the Cornish “fleghes dowr”, as the well was used to “christen” childrens dolls, fleghes dowr means “Childrens Water”, I am willing to bet on the Margery Daw name as well, the hill has a reference to Mark which is a mutation of Margh, the Cornish word for horse, Daw being mutated from dowr (water). After climbing the near 800ft hill horses would have needed water hence “Horse Water”. Maggy figgy is probably a later mix of the two names, wells are venerated in Cornwall as having special powers( you will still find ribbons hanging on trees near wells) I was brought up believing they must not be desecrated, maybe the well was locked as taking water from the well for horses was thought of as disrespect to the well spirit?