(All images via WikimediaCommons)

So, I went on a little outing with a friend to look at some historic/ folkloristic sites that I hadn’t been to before. One of them was an old monastic site where there is still a working church with a holy well (place_of_worship=holy_well) and high cross (historic=high_cross) nearby. When we went to the holy well/ high cross site, I was delighted to see that the site also had a rag tree which hadn’t been recorded on the government’s Historic Environment Viewer. Now, there could be several reasons for that which I won’t go into, but it reminded me that rag trees were something I had wanted to map, but of course, there was no tagging scheme.

I had mapped some previously using just natural=tree with various other tags, but I thought I needed a tagging scheme that was applicable to other countries and cultures as well.

To explain what a rag tree is (very simplified version): In the Celtic tradition (apparently, but some of these customs go back to the Neolithic), they were often found near a sacred well, and if you had an affliction, lets say sore eyes, you would take a piece of cloth, dip it in the sacred/ holy water, clean your eyes with it or at least rub the afflicted area of your body and tie the rag/ piece of cloth to the tree/ bush. As soon as that piece of fabric had rotted away, your ailment would be gone as well. Needless to say that this only “works” with organic fabrics, not synthetics. This is a process called a votive offering whereas you transfer the ailment onto a place holder (piece of cloth, but in antiquity, could also be a wax model of the afflicted body part - a little bit like voodoo) and leave that at a sacred/ holy/ magic place, so that God/ the Gods/ spirits can take care of your ailment by proxy, so to say. There are also (according what I only read on Wikipedia) “ex-voto” places of worship where you leave a symbol for your ailment behind after you have been healed or saved. There are many crutches left at Lourdes, for example. In the Middle Ages, people would apparently carve ships into church walls after being saved from a shipwreck etc. (That there might be graffiti of ships for other reasons is another matter…) Another weird fact relating to that: People in antiquity and the Middle Ages believed that the womb was like a toad wandering in the body of a woman (something to do with hysterics; I won’t go there now), so whenever they had “women’s trouble”, the votive offering would take the shape of a toad.

So, I pretty quickly settled on the key place of worship, because there is a ritualistic element to the custom which is still very much in use in Ireland, at least. There are also, as someone already pointed out in the Irish Telegram group, similar traditions like wassailing in England which result in decorated trees.

In my opinion, there are also traces of that tradition in the Grimm Brothers fairy tale “Cinderella” which I might go into when I do a video about the topic. ;-)

I had mapped the Irish examples I had seen and photographed and some I found on Wikimedia was place_of_worship=rag_tree, but I decided to change that to place_of_worship=sacred_tree to cover more religions and cultures. There are several trees tagged as “sacred” in some way or other already on OSM, according to taginfo: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=sacred+tree#values

I’m suggesting on the wiki to use sacred_tree=rag_tree for those in Ireland and the clootie/ cloutie/ cloughtie trees in Scotland to avoid the several spellings in Scotland. Some might also be known as “fairy tree”, but be careful about tagging those; reasons are explained on the Wiki.

I only retagged the Irish examples today, so the infobox still says “This tag does not appear in the OSM database.”, but there are actually a few.