The Doric: Tatties

Doric, the dialect spoken in the North-East of Scotland is rich in words and phrases associated with the land and the sea. I so much enjoyed my recent journey through the Doric dictionary that I plan to revisit it on an irregular and random basis. As before, the examples are taken mainly from Buchan Claik, The Saut an the Glaur o't written in 1989 by Peter Buchan and David Toulmin.

TATTIES: Potatoes, as in Tattie-Chapper, a potato-masher.

'It was the day for sums at the wee country school and the Dominie asked young Johnnie an arithmetical question. "Johnnie, if 5 visitors arrived by surprise at your house for dinner and your ma had only 4 tatties, how would she divide them?" Johnnie, not the brightest of arithmeticians, answered almost immediately. "please sir, she widna divide the tatties, she'd chap 'em!" '

As you have probably guessed these are not ordinary potatoes, they are sea potatoes. Sometimes called heart urchins, and known scientifically as Echinocardium cordatum, they live in offshore burrows in the sand.

A live sea potato has lots of short hair-like spines which lie flattened across its body. It looks for all the world like a hairy potato, hence its common name. The sea potatoes in my blip are the bald, fragile, skeletons of dead urchins that I found washed up onto the beach after a recent storm. The smile-like opening at lower centre is the urchin's mouth, its much smaller anus is top centre.

Zoomify and enjoy the exquisite sculpturing of the shell.