Crabs

Looking for some Autumn colour we spent the afternoon at Fyvie Castle. the Autumn leaves were a tad past their best and the most colourful thing that I could find were these crab apples. They look delicious but of course like all crab apples they were small and mouth-puckeringly sour and astringent.

Thinking of some words to write I remembered that I had no idea why these ancestors of cultivated apples are known as crabs. So I reached for the Oxford English Dictionary and can report as follows:

"A Scots form scrab, or scrabbe, is known from the beginning of 16th century, and may easily be much older. This is apparently originally Norse, from the Swedish dialect word skrabba, the fruit of the wild apple-tree, and may be the original form. In that case crabbe, or crab , would be a southern perversion."

So there you have it!

Zoomify and see if you can spot the tiny insects.