If the hens come into the house, or if the cock crows on the threshold, a visitor is coming. If you have money in your pocket and turn it when you first hear the cuckoo you will be rich all that year; but if your pocket be empty so it will remain. There is a small bird attending on the cuckoo, generally a meadow-pipit. It is called in Durham the cuckoo’s sandy, and is supposed to provide its patron with food.
When the peacock screams, it is going to rain.
The magpie is an unlucky bird because it would not go into the ark with Noah, but sat outside, "jabbering at the drowned world."
"One is sorrow, two mirth,
Three a wedding, four a birth,
Five heaven, six hell,
Seven the de’il’s ain sel’!"
But if you have the misfortune to see one magpie you may nullify the omen by making the sign of the cross, or, as some do, by waving a hand at the evil bird, and saying, "Mag, I defy thee."
The raven is thought to be an unlucky bird, though here in Durham city we should think better of it, for one made the fortune of Sir John Duck by dropping a gold piece at his feet when he was a poor out-of-work butcher-boy. He became a rich coal-owner, and in his memory coals are often called "ducks" in Durham; and the "Old Duck Main" still exists at Rainton.
If rooks, or crows, as we call them here, desert a rookery, it means the downfall of the family on whose property it is. Swallows, once sacred to the Penates, and honoured as the heralds of the spring, are lucky, and their nests must never be pulled down, as they bring good fortune to the place where they build, and it bodes ill luck if they leave a place they have once tenanted.
Naturally, much local lore has gathered round the cathedral, the great Mother-Church of the diocese. The death superstition relating to the minute-bell, the ringing of the Pancake Bell, and the legend of the knocker, have already been mentioned. The Curfew Bell still rings at nine (the hour of compline), not at eight, as in other places, but never on Saturday, because on the night of that day a man, who went alone to ring, was spirited away, and never seen again.
When, on May 29, the choristers go to the central tower, they sing anthems on three sides only, and except the western side, because it was from this point that the man leaped whose tombstone is seen below. It is a mutilated effigy of Frosterly marble, and is said to represent Hob of Pelaw, holding the purse of money for which he risked and lost his life, and the fossils in the marble are said, by schoolboys, to be the coins contained in it. Country people come, for some unknown reason, to draw their foot over the purse.
Curiously, the churchyard here is on the north side of the church. The cloisters are ceiled with Irish oak, so that they never harbour dust or cobwebs, and the saying goes that if the Protestants were not always doing something to the cathedral the Catholics could take it away from them!