The Yellow That Bites: Brother Fergal's Colours for the Book of Kells

A Monastery Columnist piece, written in character. Brother Fergal is a fictional colour-maker; his journal is imagined, the pigments and history are not.

First, a warning. Do not lick the yellow.

I say this to the novices every week. I say it to myself every day. And still, after an afternoon of grinding, I find my lips taste of something sharp and my head hums like a hive. I have now moved the yellow to its own corner of the cellar. It sulks there, glowing.

It is called orpiment. It comes as a stone, bright as a buttercup and shiny as fish scales, and it is not native to this place. It travels a long way to reach us. Ground on the slab with a little water and a binder, it gives a yellow that looks like gold on the page. The scribes love it. The scribes do not grind it. The scribes are not the ones with the humming head.

The red is kinder, if you are careful. Red lead, we call it, made by roasting lead until it blushes. Brother Ultan uses it for the tiny dots that march around the great capitals, hundreds of them, each one a drop on the point of a stick. He counts them under his breath. I have heard him weep at a crooked one.

Green comes from copper. You leave copper to the vinegar fumes and it grows a crust the colour of moss, which I scrape off. It is greedy, though. Left too long on the skin, it can eat into the page. I am still arguing with it.

But the blue. The blue is my love.

Brother Ultan says it must come from a precious stone over the sea. Ultan is a scribe, and scribes think everything beautiful must be expensive. My blue comes from a weed. Woad, the dyer's plant, steeped and fermented until it stinks like a midden, then skimmed and dried. It gives a deep blue for the robes and the borders. I have stained both hands to the wrist. The cook will not let me near the bread.

For purples, there are plants and lichens, coaxed with long soaking. Some of my batches turn pink, some turn grey, and one, last week, turned the colour of a bruise and then, I swear, of nothing at all. I have written that one down as "a lesson".

We came here from Iona because the island was no longer safe. Raiders kept coming back. So the community brought what it had and began again, inland, at Kells. A colour cellar is a strange thing to carry across the sea. Most of mine I had to make again from the ground up, from the plants of this place.

That is the thought I keep, scrubbing woad off my knuckles. These colours were not painted on somewhere grand and then sent here. They were ground, steeped, boiled and argued over in Kells.

From the reader in Kells today: I teach science in this town now, and yes, I still blow things up for the students. The Book that Fergal coloured was made here. It sits behind glass in Dublin. It belongs home in Kells. Not on loan. Home.