Not many Ulster words have escaped the net thrown by C.I. Macafee and her team who compiled the excellent Concise Ulster Dictionary.
I was sent one such word last week, which I had come across in the Rosses many years ago and had forgotten about. The old lady from whom I heard it died many years ago at the great age of 104. Never having come across it elsewhere in the coun ty, nor in the Ulster dialect dictionaries of the 19th century, I thought that old Mary Sweeney from Meenbanad had picked it up in Scotland, where she had to go to find employment long before she entered her teens.
Now I've been sent the word by Mary Ross, a Donegal woman by birth who lives in Belfast. She assures me that the word was known in that outpost of Ulster Scots, east Donegal and west Tyrone. The word is gan sel, and it means a garlic sauce.
You'll find the word in the Scots dictionaries. Gansel, we are told, is the condiment to go with goose. In Edward Kelly's The Complete Proverbs of Scot- land (1721), you'll find this: "A good goose, but she has an ill gansel. Spoken when one has done a good turn, and by after behaviour spoils the grace of it."
It's from the Old French ganse, some kind of a sauce, plus aille, a derivative of ail, garlic; in later French, janse d'aulx, used in the same sense. It was made in Donegal, as it was in the days of the early 15th century Liber Cocorum, from crushed garlic and milk.
"The foot-and-mouth will spread like wildfire here if it reaches us," a neighbour's child said to me recently, and immediately asked the question, "what's wildfire anyway?" It's the will-of-the-wisp, phosphorescence occasioned by dying vegetation, often seen on bog land and always at night.
Summer lightning is called wildfire in Scotland. Burns has, "Was't the wildfire scorched their boughs?" in Verses near Drumlanrig. It was also a name for erysipilas, both in south-east Ireland and south-western England. "A wilde fyr up-on their bodies fall!" wrote old Chaucer.
A little book I bought for £1 in Cornwall, Hunt's Popular Romances of the West of Eng- land has this little charm: "Christ he walketh over the land, Carried the wildfire in his hand. He rebuked the fire and bid it stand, `Stand, wildfire, stand. In the name of the Father etc.' ", Alas, there is no charm against foot-and-mouth disease that I know of.