Note 894 — Chapter XIII · ENGLISH EDENS

“When I was a child I would no more have thought of going out on Easter morning without a real Easter egg than I would have thought of leaving my stocking unsuspended from the foot of my bed on Christmas Eve. A few days before Easter I used to go out to the park, where there were a great many whin bushes, and gather whinblossoms, which I carried home to my mother, who put two eggs in a tin, one for me and one for my sister, and added the whinblossoms and water to them, and set them to boil together until the eggs were hard and the shells were stained a pretty brown hue.

“On Easter Monday my sister and I would carry our eggs to a mound in the park called ‘The Dummy’s Hill,’ and would trundle them down the slope. All the boys and girls we knew used to trundle their eggs on Easter Monday. We called it ‘trundling’. The egg-shell generally cracked during the operation of ‘trundling,’ and then the owner of it solemnly sat down and ate the hard-boiled egg, which, of course, tasted very much better than an egg eaten in the ordinary way. ‘The Dummy’s Hill’ was sadly soiled with egg-shells at the end of Easter Monday morning.

“My uncle, who was a learned man, said that this custom of ‘trundling’ eggs was a survival of an old Druidical rite. It seems to me to be queer that we in the North of Ireland should still be practising that ancient ceremony when English children should have completely forgotten it, and should think of an Easter egg, not as a real thing laid by hens and related to the ancient religion of these islands, but as a piece of confectionery turned out by machinery and having no ancient significance whatever.”—Ervine, St. John, The Daily Chronicle, 4th April, 1919.