Laetitia and her group drove along the north shore of the Firth of Forth to Pittenweem. The name is derived from Pictish and Scottish Gaelic, meaning “the place of caves.” Perhaps the most famous of the underground caverns in the area is the Cave of St. Fillan, an Irish monk who came to Fife from Munster in the eighth century. The tradition about St. Fillan is that he had the power of healing the sick and that his arm glowed, enabling him to read scriptures and write sermons in a dark sea cave. An arm bone of St. Fillan was given to Robert Bruce on the eve of the victorious Battle of Bannockburn and some credit the relic with Bruce’s success. In commemoration of the victory, Bruce established a monastery dedicated to St. Fillan. The group visited St. Fillan’s Cave and then drove on to Cellardyke, their evening’s abode. Laetitia penned a couple of lines of verse en route.
When they arrived in Cellardyke, they did a walkabout. Cellardyke’s harbor was once filled with its herring fishing fleet, but is now home to mostly pleasure craft. A town with a name like Cellardyke might have been featured in one of the Bailey and Hurst Rude books, but isn’t. As they walked along, a woman in the group named Liz, from London’s east end, asked a local man if they would find a “three-wheel trike” in a cellar in Cellardyke. When he walked away puzzled, Liz explained to the group, “Three-wheel trike is Cockney rhyming slang for masculine lesbian. In rhyming slang, two or three words that rhyme with a rude word are substituted for it. Some of these can get complex, with rhyming slang phrases replacing other rhyming slang phrases. It seems obscure to those unfamiliar with it.” Laetitia remembered encountering it once before, when they were in Bristol. She decided to use it as the basis for the day’s limerick.
When Liz queried if she’d see the like
Of what Cockneys call a three-wheel trike
In some local cellar
It puzzled a feller
In the Scottish town named Cellardyke.