Bere Bannocks: Orkney's Ancient Barley Bread

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The antiquity of bere is supported by archaeological and historical evidence of barley cultivation, but whether the modern landrace descends directly from Viking or earlier introductions cannot be proven. For the bannock itself, the folklorist F. Marian McNeill's The Scots Kitchen (1929) is the main source used here: her recipes and her record of how bere bread was eaten in her day are good evidence, but her word origins are her own suggestions. Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, ed. Tom Jaine, 2014) is used as a reference check. Its entry on bere meal leans heavily on Catherine Brown's A Year in a Scots Kitchen (1996), so its figures for Orkney production describe the 1990s, not today.

Bere

established Bere is an old six-row barley landrace that ripens quickly, which suits the short summers and long daylight of the far north. It was once the main grain of Orkney and Shetland, used for bread, porridge and brewing. During the twentieth century it was largely replaced by modern barley varieties, but small areas are still grown.

shared Sources disagree on how to count bere's rows. The Agronomy Institute and botanical accounts treat it as a six-row barley. Catherine Brown, quoted in The Oxford Companion to Food (3rd edn, 2014), says bere has four ear rows rather than the usual six, yielding less per acre but "a grain of remarkable flavour". The two descriptions are less opposed than they look: older Scottish writers called bigg "four-rowed barley" because the grains of its loose, irregular ear appear to sit in four rows. This card follows the botanical classification.

established The name itself is old. The Companion's entry on barley explains that the English word derives from Old English bære, which survives in Scotland as "bere" without the "-ly" suffix that turned it into an adjective meaning "of barley". The Companion adds that in the north it is pronounced "bare". It calls bere "a primitive form of barley that does better in acid soils", which helps explain why it held on in the islands.

established The Companion places bere within a wider northern pattern. Its entry on Orkney and Shetland, drawing on Catherine Brown, notes that the islands were colonised by Scandinavians from the 9th to the 15th centuries and that bere meal and oats kept a prominent place among their staples. Its entry on barley breads explains why such breads were usually flat: barley lacks the gluten needed for a risen loaf, so it was commonly baked unleavened on a griddle. Barley flatbreads are still important in Norway, Sweden and northern Finland, and a barley bread called bonnag survived into the 20th century on the Isle of Man.

Beremeal and bannocks

established Bere grain is dried, roasted and stone-ground to make beremeal, a brownish flour with an earthy, nutty flavour. Bere bannocks are made by mixing beremeal with a little plain flour, salt, bicarbonate of soda and buttermilk, then cooking the round, flat dough on a hot girdle. They are eaten warm or cold, with butter, cheese or jam.

established That modern recipe is only one of two that the folklorist F. Marian McNeill gives in The Scots Kitchen (1929). Her "old method" has no raising agent: a little salt and butter go into boiling milk, enough barley-meal is stirred in quickly to make a pliable dough, and it is rolled thin, cut into rounds the size of a meat plate and baked on a hot girdle, turned once, to be eaten hot. In Sutherland, she notes, the dough was often mixed with unheated whey and no butter. Her "modern method" uses buttermilk, bicarbonate of soda and cream of tartar, with some wheat flour, and she adds that the proportion of flour "may be increased to taste". Bicarbonate of soda only became a household item in the nineteenth century, so a soda-raised bannock is a relatively recent form of a much older bread.

established Catherine Brown's description, quoted in The Oxford Companion to Food, shows what the bannock had become by the 1990s. Every Orkney baker then made a daily supply of the bere bannock, about 15 cm (6 in) across and 1 to 2.5 cm thick, a flat, girdle-baked, soft scone. Its marks are a grey-brown colour and a robust, earthy tang. Before raising agents arrived in the 19th century, Brown says, it was a very thin, soft pancake, which she compares to a chapati or a modern potato scone. That fits McNeill's "old method" of a thin, unleavened round.

established The Companion's entry on bannocks adds older evidence for how the bread was cooked. An English–Latin wordbook of about 1483 renders "bannock" as focacius (hearth bread) and panis subcinericius (bread baked in the ashes). Bannocks were originally baked in the embers and then toasted on the girdle; baking entirely on the girdle came later. The Companion also records the Scottish preference for barley: in Scotland the bannock was "pre-eminently made with barley", while in England it was more often made of oats. A bannock was thicker than an oatcake and larger than a scone.

established Samuel Johnson met these breads on his journey to the Western Isles in 1773. In his account, after describing the thin, hard oatcakes, he writes that the barley cakes were thicker and softer, and that he learned to eat them "without unwillingness; the blackness of their colour raises some dislike, but the taste is not disagreeable". The dark colour he noticed is the same grey-brown that Brown describes in beremeal.

Barley bread in Scotland

established Barley, and the hardier bere or bigg, was a staple bread grain across Scotland long before oatmeal took the lead. McNeill notes that barley bannocks were popular throughout the country for centuries and "still popular in the north", and that oatcakes were once the cottager's "gala-bread" while barley bread was the ordinary fare. The ordinary cottage bread she describes was barley and mashlum (mixed-grain) bannocks and oatcakes, all baked on the girdle. She quotes the writer Hugh Haliburton's point that even when barley bread was a staple, most of the bere harvest went to the brewer and distiller, and only "the lighter qualities of both bigg and barley" were ground "for pot or girdle".

shared The food historian Annette Hope, in A Caledonian Feast (1987), goes further and reads travellers' accounts as showing bere valued more as food than as malt. She argues that bere, not oats, was the more widely grown grain until about the end of the seventeenth century, especially in the Highlands. Under the old infield system, she explains, the land nearest the farm town was manured and cropped every year, first with bere and then with oats. She also points out that true barley does poorly on acid soil, and that liming was not practised until the seventeenth century, and then only in East Lothian and the Forth valley; so when early writers speak of "barley" they almost certainly mean bere. Once liming spread, improved barley pushed bere out of the better land. This is her interpretation of patchy evidence, but it is consistent with McNeill's picture of barley bannocks as the old everyday bread.

established Hope traces bere's fall down the social scale. By the early 1700s, she writes, bere bannocks and bere porridge were still common in the Highlands, but in the Lowlands only the very poor ate them, a position that held for a century or so. Travellers kept meeting the bread. Faujas de Saint-Fond listed "sea biscuit, oatcakes, barley bannocks" as the three breads at a Mull laird's breakfast table in 1784. On the Wordsworths' Scottish tour of 1803, Dorothy found barley cakes "as thin as our oat-bread but, instead of being crisp, are soft and leathery"; hungry, she and William ate them with delicious butter, but when the same bread came back later "we did not like it".

established Barley bannocks run through Scottish song. McNeill collects the old song with the refrain "Bannocks o' bere meal, / Bannocks o' barley", a toast to "the Hielandman's bannocks o' barley", and the "Todlen But and Todlen Ben" line in praise of the alewife who "gies us gude bannocks to drink her ale". Related breads in her collection include pease bannocks, made the same way with pease-meal, and mashlum or meslin bannocks of mixed meals, called brash-bread in some places. Burns has "Twa mashlum bannocks" in "The Author's Earnest Cry and Prayer".

traditional McNeill derives "bannock" from Latin panis, bread, "probably through the influence of the Church", and suggests it may first have meant Communion bread. The Latin root is widely accepted; the Communion-bread idea is her own guess.

shared The Oxford Companion to Food gives a slightly different route: the word "may be" from Gaelic bannach, itself from Latin panicium. Both accounts end in Latin, but the Companion offers its version as a possibility. It adds that "bannock" became a general word for bread in regions that did not grow wheat, and that Wright's English Dialect Dictionary found it in use throughout northern and western Britain. The similar-sounding "jannock", a Lancashire and northern English word for unleavened oat bread, is not recorded before the 16th century and is probably unrelated.

Bere in the northern kitchen

established In the Northern Isles bere bread went with fish. McNeill records sillocks (young saithe) wind-dried until hard and eaten raw by Shetland schoolchildren as a relish with their midday "piece" of buttered bere bannock or oatcake, and Orkney cuiths, salted and dried, eaten with buttered bere bannocks and tea. A quoted Shetland account describes fried sillocks eaten on buttered bere bread, "a darkly brown, flatly sour scone". She also gives bere-meal porridge as a dish of Caithness, Orkney and Shetland, and describes the Shetland way of hulling bere for broth by bruising it with a mallet in a knocking-stone and floating off the husks.

established Barley bread held on longest in the islands. A survey of 1871, summarised by Annette Hope, found the Northern Isles diet built on milk, fish, potatoes, beremeal and oatmeal. On Lewis, Hope records from a friend who grew up there after the First World War, barley bannock rather than the wheat loaf was still the standard bread, and her grandfather could remember the first yeast-raised wheat loaves reaching the island. Each stalk of barley at harvest was treated as precious. Writing in 1987, Hope found barley and bere bannocks surviving "just" in the north and the islands, mostly eaten by older people who preferred them to white bread shipped from the mainland, and quotes an old Caithness woman: "A bit of bere-bannock every morning keeps me right all day." By then, she notes, plain bere meal was rarely used on its own; a share of wheat flour, sometimes half and half, had become traditional, and an Orkney recipe she prints uses baking powder and treacle in place of buttermilk.

traditional McNeill records a belief, still held in parts of the Highlands in her day, that bannocks must be kneaded sunwise (deiseal), the lucky direction, and never widdershins.

The Barony Mill

established The Barony Mill at Birsay, built in 1873 on the site of earlier mills, is a water-powered mill that still grinds bere into beremeal. It is run by the Birsay Heritage Trust and is open to visitors.

Revival

established In recent decades, the Agronomy Institute at Orkney College has studied bere and promoted its use. Distilleries and breweries have produced whisky and beer from bere barley, and bakers use beremeal in breads and biscuits.

established The Companion closes its bere meal entry by noting that by the end of the 20th century bere meal had been listed among the traditional foods of the European Community, a status the crofters who ate it daily would have found surprising.

• Bere is an ancient barley landrace.
• Beremeal is ground at a water-powered mill in Orkney.
• Bere bannocks are cooked on a girdle.
• Bere has been used to make whisky and beer.
• Bere ripens quickly in the northern summer.
• In Shetland, McNeill records, schoolchildren ate dried raw sillocks with a buttered bere bannock as their midday piece.
• Oatcakes were once the special-occasion bread and barley bannocks the everyday one, the reverse of what many people now assume.
• "Bere" is simply the Old English word for barley, kept alive in Scots.
• Samuel Johnson disliked the dark colour of Highland barley cakes in 1773 but admitted the taste was "not disagreeable".
• The writer Hugh Haliburton claimed bere-meal bannocks gave "beauty to the skin and sweetness to the temper" (as quoted by McNeill).

• Disputed: the Vikings introduced bere. Bere is often called Britain's oldest cereal still in commercial cultivation and is said to have come with the Vikings or earlier. Barley has been grown in Orkney since the Neolithic, and whether the modern landrace descends from any particular introduction cannot be proven.
• Myth: Bere bannocks were always made with buttermilk and soda. McNeill's older method, with no raising agent, stirred meal into boiling milk and butter. Bicarbonate of soda only became a household item in the nineteenth century, so the soda-raised bannock is a relatively recent form of a much older bread.
• Disputed: "bannock" first meant Communion bread. McNeill derives the word from Latin panis and suggests this meaning, but the Communion idea is her own guess. The Oxford Companion to Food offers a route through Gaelic bannach, from Latin panicium, as a possibility.
• Disputed: bere out-ranked oats until about 1700. Annette Hope argues this from travellers' accounts and the old infield system. It is her interpretation of patchy evidence, though it fits McNeill's picture of barley bannocks as the old everyday bread.
• Disputed: bere is a four-row barley. Catherine Brown, quoted in the Companion, says so. Botanists class it as six-row, and its loose ear can look four-rowed.