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By Harriet Gendall
“Pillas”—wrote Robert Morton Nance in 1930— “smaller than oats and without husk, was formerly a common crop in Cornwall, but seems now to have become quite extinct.”
Bound inside a centuries-old herbarium volume at the University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections are four burnished feather-like panicles, collected “neere Land’s End” in 1667 by John Ray and Francis Willoughby. There at the “extreme corner of Cornwall”—Ray said—this grain was cultivated abundantly, sold at a price no less than wheat, and called by the country people “pillis” and “pill-corn”.
Pillas thrived on marginal land and was often the “farewell crop”—the last sown in a rotation. With thin papery husks its grain needed no dehulling. Roasted over a slow fire and ground in granite “traffs”, its flour boiled with milk made a hearty porridge known as ‘pillas-gerts’—once a dietary mainstay of the Cornish working class. Pillas was fed to livestock both thrashed and in the sheaf, and its fine straw was woven into bonnets and rope to tie down thatch. But by the mid-nineteenth century it was gone from Cornish fields. “The last crop I saw harvested”—wrote J.H. Thomas of St Just in Penwith—was in 1867 in Sancreed”.
My grandad, like Nance—whose Cornish to English dictionary he helped prepare—was something of a polymath. Dad described him last month—on what would have been his 100th birthday—as: “linguist, scholar, teacher, songwriter, lexicographer, planter of trees, dreamer of dreams”. To this I would add ‘cultural revivalist’. The motto of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies that he and Nance had been active in— ‘gather ye fragments that are left that nothing be lost’—describes the spirit in which they took an interest both in the latent language of their forefathers, and in this unassuming grain.
I first learned about pillas while home in Cornwall and visiting grandad and his wife Jan—a folklorist—in April 2017 on his 93rd and sadly last birthday. Recounting my recent Master’s research on the ‘lost’ Andean root crop ‘mauka’ (Mirabilis expansa) in Peru—Jan interjected: “Of course you know Cornwall has its own lost crop?” To my astonishment she led me outside to a patch of thin green spears emerging through a bird-proof grill, bordered by yellow cowslips. Its name was “pillas”, she said, and gave me a pot of seedlings. Suffice to say, several years and one global pandemic later, pillas became the focus of my PhD.
As an ethnobotanical researcher I explore people-plant relationships. Their shaping and re-shaping over time fascinates me, most of all in relation to food. An endangered oat might sound absurd, but modern varieties bred for yield and uniformity have displaced many of the world’s traditional crops, and with them much biocultural diversity. Re-rooting them in our foodscapes offers the potential to re-diversify fields, improve nutrition, reduce inputs, empower small-scale farmers, and re-enliven local cultures.
But this is not the straightforward, romantic lost-and-found story it might seem. I soon discovered that the seedlings I inherited on grandad’s birthday were not pillas, but a larger-seeded huskless type which it closely resembles, misidentified and sent to Jan by the Welsh Plant Breeding Station in the late ‘80s. This so-called ‘large naked oat’ had evolved separately, arriving in Western Europe in the early 1800s from its native China/Mongolia, from which stemmed centuries of confusion over the two. Disentangling spurious seeds and muddled accounts, I was a detective on a case of mistaken botanical identity, chronicler of a ‘tale of two naked oats’.
This sprawling history has been a maze to navigate, and for a long while every ‘ah-ha’ research moment seemed to throw more into question. But visits to many archives and herbaria, countless discussions with collaborators, and a thorough exploration of names and toponyms have been illuminating. It transpires that the small naked oat was not Cornwall’s ‘own lost crop’. Once cultivated in various parts of Britain and Ireland, it was last reported in “isolated districts” of Co. Galway and Co. Kerry in the 1930s. Today long-forgotten by farmers, fieldnames referring to it—the oldest recorded in 12th century Staffordshire, and examples in the Monts d'Arrée in Brittany —embed its memory further north and south. Pillas was not unique to my homeland, but Cornish accounts are by far the richest I have come across to date.
Remarkably, pillas did survive. Considered a botanical curiosity, it passed through botanists’ hands over several centuries, later making its way into seed banks. Studying this material, collaborators at the University of Aberystwyth have shown it to comprise just two genetic types. Although probably a tiny fraction of its former diversity, this precious seed presents an opportunity.
Starting in 2021 with just a few handfuls acquired from genebanks in Europe and North America, seed was bulked up in 2022 through the establishment of Loveland Community Grains and with help from Gothelney Farm in Somerset. Last year around 20kg of beautiful grain and 160kg of straw were harvested across trial plots on six Cornish farms. Sickled by farmers and volunteers over six dry end-of-summer evenings, the long shadows of stooked pillas sheaves fell across fields in West Penwith for the first time in over 150 years. We had been lucky to steal a gap in the almost incessant rain. But unlike then, there was no means of thrashing them on the farm.
Via numerous car- and van- loads, sheaves were shipped to a polytunnel in Stithians where they were dried and weighed, and later to the site of Cornish Golden Grains near St Austell. There Will Radmore and his Dad Roger tinkered with a small 1980s-1990s MF 8 Sampa combine ‘til it worked as a stationary thresher. A conventional combine would have swallowed up our modest harvest, but calibrating the Sampa so the small light grain was not blown out was difficult. Compromising on retaining seed, but also much straw and husk, the final clean was accomplished by the IBERS team at Aberystwyth, and their trial plot scale equipment.
Sampling the fruits of our labour diffused the challenges of processing this unorthodox cereal. Following a nineteenth century recipe for ‘pillas-gerts’—recorded by Cornish folk-storyteller William Bottrell—I made pillas flour. From this I baked six triumphant cakes—one for each farmer taking part in the trials—folding windfall apples and stem ginger into the rich brown batter. The future of pillas remains uncertain, but it tastes bloody good. Given the increasing unpredictability of climate and resources, its ability to thrive in low-nutrient, wet and exposed conditions should not be overlooked, despite it yielding lower in grain than modern cereals. Meanwhile, interest in the large naked oat is on the rise, grown regeneratively as a wholegrain and for oat milk, spurred on by UK farmers, bakers, plant breeders active in the non-commodity grains movement. Both naked oats persistently intertwine and exploring them in parallel has been insightful.
Complex and ambiguous—yet rooted in hope—the story of pillas reflects both the challenges and opportunities of recovering eroded biocultural diversity in today’s world. Getting to know this elusive grain has been, admittedly, obsessive. Over the years I have connected intimately to it—making it my research ‘subject’, fixated on bringing it back to life—but I’m increasingly conscious that I’m not the sole orchestrater of this quest. A friend and I recently watched The Botany of Desire, a documentary flipping the assumption that humans alone drive domestication; revealing—in a plant’s-eye twist—how we bend over backwards to propagate and consume crops. Articulating a feeling already in my bones, my friend turned to me and said: “It seems pillas is putting you to work”.
“Pillas”—wrote Robert Morton Nance in 1930— “smaller than oats and without husk, was formerly a common crop in Cornwall, but seems now to have become quite extinct.”
Bound inside a centuries-old herbarium volume at the University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections are four burnished feather-like panicles, collected “neere Land’s End” in 1667 by John Ray and Francis Willoughby. There at the “extreme corner of Cornwall”—Ray said—this grain was cultivated abundantly, sold at a price no less than wheat, and called by the country people “pillis” and “pill-corn”.
Pillas thrived on marginal land and was often the “farewell crop”—the last sown in a rotation. With thin papery husks its grain needed no dehulling. Roasted over a slow fire and ground in granite “traffs”, its flour boiled with milk made a hearty porridge known as ‘pillas-gerts’—once a dietary mainstay of the Cornish working class. Pillas was fed to livestock both thrashed and in the sheaf, and its fine straw was woven into bonnets and rope to tie down thatch. But by the mid-nineteenth century it was gone from Cornish fields. “The last crop I saw harvested”—wrote J.H. Thomas of St Just in Penwith—was in 1867 in Sancreed”.
My grandad, like Nance—whose Cornish to English dictionary he helped prepare—was something of a polymath. Dad described him last month—on what would have been his 100th birthday—as: “linguist, scholar, teacher, songwriter, lexicographer, planter of trees, dreamer of dreams”. To this I would add ‘cultural revivalist’. The motto of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies that he and Nance had been active in— ‘gather ye fragments that are left that nothing be lost’—describes the spirit in which they took an interest both in the latent language of their forefathers, and in this unassuming grain.
I first learned about pillas while home in Cornwall and visiting grandad and his wife Jan—a folklorist—in April 2017 on his 93rd and sadly last birthday. Recounting my recent Master’s research on the ‘lost’ Andean root crop ‘mauka’ (Mirabilis expansa) in Peru—Jan interjected: “Of course you know Cornwall has its own lost crop?” To my astonishment she led me outside to a patch of thin green spears emerging through a bird-proof grill, bordered by yellow cowslips. Its name was “pillas”, she said, and gave me a pot of seedlings. Suffice to say, several years and one global pandemic later, pillas became the focus of my PhD.
As an ethnobotanical researcher I explore people-plant relationships. Their shaping and re-shaping over time fascinates me, most of all in relation to food. An endangered oat might sound absurd, but modern varieties bred for yield and uniformity have displaced many of the world’s traditional crops, and with them much biocultural diversity. Re-rooting them in our foodscapes offers the potential to re-diversify fields, improve nutrition, reduce inputs, empower small-scale farmers, and re-enliven local cultures.
But this is not the straightforward, romantic lost-and-found story it might seem. I soon discovered that the seedlings I inherited on grandad’s birthday were not pillas, but a larger-seeded huskless type which it closely resembles, misidentified and sent to Jan by the Welsh Plant Breeding Station in the late ‘80s. This so-called ‘large naked oat’ had evolved separately, arriving in Western Europe in the early 1800s from its native China/Mongolia, from which stemmed centuries of confusion over the two. Disentangling spurious seeds and muddled accounts, I was a detective on a case of mistaken botanical identity, chronicler of a ‘tale of two naked oats’.
This sprawling history has been a maze to navigate, and for a long while every ‘ah-ha’ research moment seemed to throw more into question. But visits to many archives and herbaria, countless discussions with collaborators, and a thorough exploration of names and toponyms have been illuminating. It transpires that the small naked oat was not Cornwall’s ‘own lost crop’. Once cultivated in various parts of Britain and Ireland, it was last reported in “isolated districts” of Co. Galway and Co. Kerry in the 1930s. Today long-forgotten by farmers, fieldnames referring to it—the oldest recorded in 12th century Staffordshire, and examples in the Monts d'Arrée in Brittany —embed its memory further north and south. Pillas was not unique to my homeland, but Cornish accounts are by far the richest I have come across to date.
Remarkably, pillas did survive. Considered a botanical curiosity, it passed through botanists’ hands over several centuries, later making its way into seed banks. Studying this material, collaborators at the University of Aberystwyth have shown it to comprise just two genetic types. Although probably a tiny fraction of its former diversity, this precious seed presents an opportunity.
Starting in 2021 with just a few handfuls acquired from genebanks in Europe and North America, seed was bulked up in 2022 through the establishment of Loveland Community Grains and with help from Gothelney Farm in Somerset. Last year around 20kg of beautiful grain and 160kg of straw were harvested across trial plots on six Cornish farms. Sickled by farmers and volunteers over six dry end-of-summer evenings, the long shadows of stooked pillas sheaves fell across fields in West Penwith for the first time in over 150 years. We had been lucky to steal a gap in the almost incessant rain. But unlike then, there was no means of thrashing them on the farm.
Via numerous car- and van- loads, sheaves were shipped to a polytunnel in Stithians where they were dried and weighed, and later to the site of Cornish Golden Grains near St Austell. There Will Radmore and his Dad Roger tinkered with a small 1980s-1990s MF 8 Sampa combine ‘til it worked as a stationary thresher. A conventional combine would have swallowed up our modest harvest, but calibrating the Sampa so the small light grain was not blown out was difficult. Compromising on retaining seed, but also much straw and husk, the final clean was accomplished by the IBERS team at Aberystwyth, and their trial plot scale equipment.
Sampling the fruits of our labour diffused the challenges of processing this unorthodox cereal. Following a nineteenth century recipe for ‘pillas-gerts’—recorded by Cornish folk-storyteller William Bottrell—I made pillas flour. From this I baked six triumphant cakes—one for each farmer taking part in the trials—folding windfall apples and stem ginger into the rich brown batter. The future of pillas remains uncertain, but it tastes bloody good. Given the increasing unpredictability of climate and resources, its ability to thrive in low-nutrient, wet and exposed conditions should not be overlooked, despite it yielding lower in grain than modern cereals. Meanwhile, interest in the large naked oat is on the rise, grown regeneratively as a wholegrain and for oat milk, spurred on by UK farmers, bakers, plant breeders active in the non-commodity grains movement. Both naked oats persistently intertwine and exploring them in parallel has been insightful.
Complex and ambiguous—yet rooted in hope—the story of pillas reflects both the challenges and opportunities of recovering eroded biocultural diversity in today’s world. Getting to know this elusive grain has been, admittedly, obsessive. Over the years I have connected intimately to it—making it my research ‘subject’, fixated on bringing it back to life—but I’m increasingly conscious that I’m not the sole orchestrater of this quest. A friend and I recently watched The Botany of Desire, a documentary flipping the assumption that humans alone drive domestication; revealing—in a plant’s-eye twist—how we bend over backwards to propagate and consume crops. Articulating a feeling already in my bones, my friend turned to me and said: “It seems pillas is putting you to work”.
Harriet Gendall is an ethnobotanical researcher exploring biocultural diversity conservation through the revitalisation of forgotten crops. Her current doctoral study at Kew Gardens focuses on “pillas”, weaving historical insights into revival efforts, in collaboration with farmers, scientists, historians and others.
By Harriet Gendall
“Pillas”—wrote Robert Morton Nance in 1930— “smaller than oats and without husk, was formerly a common crop in Cornwall, but seems now to have become quite extinct.”
Bound inside a centuries-old herbarium volume at the University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections are four burnished feather-like panicles, collected “neere Land’s End” in 1667 by John Ray and Francis Willoughby. There at the “extreme corner of Cornwall”—Ray said—this grain was cultivated abundantly, sold at a price no less than wheat, and called by the country people “pillis” and “pill-corn”.
Pillas thrived on marginal land and was often the “farewell crop”—the last sown in a rotation. With thin papery husks its grain needed no dehulling. Roasted over a slow fire and ground in granite “traffs”, its flour boiled with milk made a hearty porridge known as ‘pillas-gerts’—once a dietary mainstay of the Cornish working class. Pillas was fed to livestock both thrashed and in the sheaf, and its fine straw was woven into bonnets and rope to tie down thatch. But by the mid-nineteenth century it was gone from Cornish fields. “The last crop I saw harvested”—wrote J.H. Thomas of St Just in Penwith—was in 1867 in Sancreed”.
My grandad, like Nance—whose Cornish to English dictionary he helped prepare—was something of a polymath. Dad described him last month—on what would have been his 100th birthday—as: “linguist, scholar, teacher, songwriter, lexicographer, planter of trees, dreamer of dreams”. To this I would add ‘cultural revivalist’. The motto of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies that he and Nance had been active in— ‘gather ye fragments that are left that nothing be lost’—describes the spirit in which they took an interest both in the latent language of their forefathers, and in this unassuming grain.
I first learned about pillas while home in Cornwall and visiting grandad and his wife Jan—a folklorist—in April 2017 on his 93rd and sadly last birthday. Recounting my recent Master’s research on the ‘lost’ Andean root crop ‘mauka’ (Mirabilis expansa) in Peru—Jan interjected: “Of course you know Cornwall has its own lost crop?” To my astonishment she led me outside to a patch of thin green spears emerging through a bird-proof grill, bordered by yellow cowslips. Its name was “pillas”, she said, and gave me a pot of seedlings. Suffice to say, several years and one global pandemic later, pillas became the focus of my PhD.
As an ethnobotanical researcher I explore people-plant relationships. Their shaping and re-shaping over time fascinates me, most of all in relation to food. An endangered oat might sound absurd, but modern varieties bred for yield and uniformity have displaced many of the world’s traditional crops, and with them much biocultural diversity. Re-rooting them in our foodscapes offers the potential to re-diversify fields, improve nutrition, reduce inputs, empower small-scale farmers, and re-enliven local cultures.
But this is not the straightforward, romantic lost-and-found story it might seem. I soon discovered that the seedlings I inherited on grandad’s birthday were not pillas, but a larger-seeded huskless type which it closely resembles, misidentified and sent to Jan by the Welsh Plant Breeding Station in the late ‘80s. This so-called ‘large naked oat’ had evolved separately, arriving in Western Europe in the early 1800s from its native China/Mongolia, from which stemmed centuries of confusion over the two. Disentangling spurious seeds and muddled accounts, I was a detective on a case of mistaken botanical identity, chronicler of a ‘tale of two naked oats’.
This sprawling history has been a maze to navigate, and for a long while every ‘ah-ha’ research moment seemed to throw more into question. But visits to many archives and herbaria, countless discussions with collaborators, and a thorough exploration of names and toponyms have been illuminating. It transpires that the small naked oat was not Cornwall’s ‘own lost crop’. Once cultivated in various parts of Britain and Ireland, it was last reported in “isolated districts” of Co. Galway and Co. Kerry in the 1930s. Today long-forgotten by farmers, fieldnames referring to it—the oldest recorded in 12th century Staffordshire, and examples in the Monts d'Arrée in Brittany —embed its memory further north and south. Pillas was not unique to my homeland, but Cornish accounts are by far the richest I have come across to date.
Remarkably, pillas did survive. Considered a botanical curiosity, it passed through botanists’ hands over several centuries, later making its way into seed banks. Studying this material, collaborators at the University of Aberystwyth have shown it to comprise just two genetic types. Although probably a tiny fraction of its former diversity, this precious seed presents an opportunity.
Starting in 2021 with just a few handfuls acquired from genebanks in Europe and North America, seed was bulked up in 2022 through the establishment of Loveland Community Grains and with help from Gothelney Farm in Somerset. Last year around 20kg of beautiful grain and 160kg of straw were harvested across trial plots on six Cornish farms. Sickled by farmers and volunteers over six dry end-of-summer evenings, the long shadows of stooked pillas sheaves fell across fields in West Penwith for the first time in over 150 years. We had been lucky to steal a gap in the almost incessant rain. But unlike then, there was no means of thrashing them on the farm.
Via numerous car- and van- loads, sheaves were shipped to a polytunnel in Stithians where they were dried and weighed, and later to the site of Cornish Golden Grains near St Austell. There Will Radmore and his Dad Roger tinkered with a small 1980s-1990s MF 8 Sampa combine ‘til it worked as a stationary thresher. A conventional combine would have swallowed up our modest harvest, but calibrating the Sampa so the small light grain was not blown out was difficult. Compromising on retaining seed, but also much straw and husk, the final clean was accomplished by the IBERS team at Aberystwyth, and their trial plot scale equipment.
Sampling the fruits of our labour diffused the challenges of processing this unorthodox cereal. Following a nineteenth century recipe for ‘pillas-gerts’—recorded by Cornish folk-storyteller William Bottrell—I made pillas flour. From this I baked six triumphant cakes—one for each farmer taking part in the trials—folding windfall apples and stem ginger into the rich brown batter. The future of pillas remains uncertain, but it tastes bloody good. Given the increasing unpredictability of climate and resources, its ability to thrive in low-nutrient, wet and exposed conditions should not be overlooked, despite it yielding lower in grain than modern cereals. Meanwhile, interest in the large naked oat is on the rise, grown regeneratively as a wholegrain and for oat milk, spurred on by UK farmers, bakers, plant breeders active in the non-commodity grains movement. Both naked oats persistently intertwine and exploring them in parallel has been insightful.
Complex and ambiguous—yet rooted in hope—the story of pillas reflects both the challenges and opportunities of recovering eroded biocultural diversity in today’s world. Getting to know this elusive grain has been, admittedly, obsessive. Over the years I have connected intimately to it—making it my research ‘subject’, fixated on bringing it back to life—but I’m increasingly conscious that I’m not the sole orchestrater of this quest. A friend and I recently watched The Botany of Desire, a documentary flipping the assumption that humans alone drive domestication; revealing—in a plant’s-eye twist—how we bend over backwards to propagate and consume crops. Articulating a feeling already in my bones, my friend turned to me and said: “It seems pillas is putting you to work”.
“Pillas”—wrote Robert Morton Nance in 1930— “smaller than oats and without husk, was formerly a common crop in Cornwall, but seems now to have become quite extinct.”
Bound inside a centuries-old herbarium volume at the University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections are four burnished feather-like panicles, collected “neere Land’s End” in 1667 by John Ray and Francis Willoughby. There at the “extreme corner of Cornwall”—Ray said—this grain was cultivated abundantly, sold at a price no less than wheat, and called by the country people “pillis” and “pill-corn”.
Pillas thrived on marginal land and was often the “farewell crop”—the last sown in a rotation. With thin papery husks its grain needed no dehulling. Roasted over a slow fire and ground in granite “traffs”, its flour boiled with milk made a hearty porridge known as ‘pillas-gerts’—once a dietary mainstay of the Cornish working class. Pillas was fed to livestock both thrashed and in the sheaf, and its fine straw was woven into bonnets and rope to tie down thatch. But by the mid-nineteenth century it was gone from Cornish fields. “The last crop I saw harvested”—wrote J.H. Thomas of St Just in Penwith—was in 1867 in Sancreed”.
My grandad, like Nance—whose Cornish to English dictionary he helped prepare—was something of a polymath. Dad described him last month—on what would have been his 100th birthday—as: “linguist, scholar, teacher, songwriter, lexicographer, planter of trees, dreamer of dreams”. To this I would add ‘cultural revivalist’. The motto of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies that he and Nance had been active in— ‘gather ye fragments that are left that nothing be lost’—describes the spirit in which they took an interest both in the latent language of their forefathers, and in this unassuming grain.
I first learned about pillas while home in Cornwall and visiting grandad and his wife Jan—a folklorist—in April 2017 on his 93rd and sadly last birthday. Recounting my recent Master’s research on the ‘lost’ Andean root crop ‘mauka’ (Mirabilis expansa) in Peru—Jan interjected: “Of course you know Cornwall has its own lost crop?” To my astonishment she led me outside to a patch of thin green spears emerging through a bird-proof grill, bordered by yellow cowslips. Its name was “pillas”, she said, and gave me a pot of seedlings. Suffice to say, several years and one global pandemic later, pillas became the focus of my PhD.
As an ethnobotanical researcher I explore people-plant relationships. Their shaping and re-shaping over time fascinates me, most of all in relation to food. An endangered oat might sound absurd, but modern varieties bred for yield and uniformity have displaced many of the world’s traditional crops, and with them much biocultural diversity. Re-rooting them in our foodscapes offers the potential to re-diversify fields, improve nutrition, reduce inputs, empower small-scale farmers, and re-enliven local cultures.
But this is not the straightforward, romantic lost-and-found story it might seem. I soon discovered that the seedlings I inherited on grandad’s birthday were not pillas, but a larger-seeded huskless type which it closely resembles, misidentified and sent to Jan by the Welsh Plant Breeding Station in the late ‘80s. This so-called ‘large naked oat’ had evolved separately, arriving in Western Europe in the early 1800s from its native China/Mongolia, from which stemmed centuries of confusion over the two. Disentangling spurious seeds and muddled accounts, I was a detective on a case of mistaken botanical identity, chronicler of a ‘tale of two naked oats’.
This sprawling history has been a maze to navigate, and for a long while every ‘ah-ha’ research moment seemed to throw more into question. But visits to many archives and herbaria, countless discussions with collaborators, and a thorough exploration of names and toponyms have been illuminating. It transpires that the small naked oat was not Cornwall’s ‘own lost crop’. Once cultivated in various parts of Britain and Ireland, it was last reported in “isolated districts” of Co. Galway and Co. Kerry in the 1930s. Today long-forgotten by farmers, fieldnames referring to it—the oldest recorded in 12th century Staffordshire, and examples in the Monts d'Arrée in Brittany —embed its memory further north and south. Pillas was not unique to my homeland, but Cornish accounts are by far the richest I have come across to date.
Remarkably, pillas did survive. Considered a botanical curiosity, it passed through botanists’ hands over several centuries, later making its way into seed banks. Studying this material, collaborators at the University of Aberystwyth have shown it to comprise just two genetic types. Although probably a tiny fraction of its former diversity, this precious seed presents an opportunity.
Starting in 2021 with just a few handfuls acquired from genebanks in Europe and North America, seed was bulked up in 2022 through the establishment of Loveland Community Grains and with help from Gothelney Farm in Somerset. Last year around 20kg of beautiful grain and 160kg of straw were harvested across trial plots on six Cornish farms. Sickled by farmers and volunteers over six dry end-of-summer evenings, the long shadows of stooked pillas sheaves fell across fields in West Penwith for the first time in over 150 years. We had been lucky to steal a gap in the almost incessant rain. But unlike then, there was no means of thrashing them on the farm.
Via numerous car- and van- loads, sheaves were shipped to a polytunnel in Stithians where they were dried and weighed, and later to the site of Cornish Golden Grains near St Austell. There Will Radmore and his Dad Roger tinkered with a small 1980s-1990s MF 8 Sampa combine ‘til it worked as a stationary thresher. A conventional combine would have swallowed up our modest harvest, but calibrating the Sampa so the small light grain was not blown out was difficult. Compromising on retaining seed, but also much straw and husk, the final clean was accomplished by the IBERS team at Aberystwyth, and their trial plot scale equipment.
Sampling the fruits of our labour diffused the challenges of processing this unorthodox cereal. Following a nineteenth century recipe for ‘pillas-gerts’—recorded by Cornish folk-storyteller William Bottrell—I made pillas flour. From this I baked six triumphant cakes—one for each farmer taking part in the trials—folding windfall apples and stem ginger into the rich brown batter. The future of pillas remains uncertain, but it tastes bloody good. Given the increasing unpredictability of climate and resources, its ability to thrive in low-nutrient, wet and exposed conditions should not be overlooked, despite it yielding lower in grain than modern cereals. Meanwhile, interest in the large naked oat is on the rise, grown regeneratively as a wholegrain and for oat milk, spurred on by UK farmers, bakers, plant breeders active in the non-commodity grains movement. Both naked oats persistently intertwine and exploring them in parallel has been insightful.
Complex and ambiguous—yet rooted in hope—the story of pillas reflects both the challenges and opportunities of recovering eroded biocultural diversity in today’s world. Getting to know this elusive grain has been, admittedly, obsessive. Over the years I have connected intimately to it—making it my research ‘subject’, fixated on bringing it back to life—but I’m increasingly conscious that I’m not the sole orchestrater of this quest. A friend and I recently watched The Botany of Desire, a documentary flipping the assumption that humans alone drive domestication; revealing—in a plant’s-eye twist—how we bend over backwards to propagate and consume crops. Articulating a feeling already in my bones, my friend turned to me and said: “It seems pillas is putting you to work”.
Harriet Gendall is an ethnobotanical researcher exploring biocultural diversity conservation through the revitalisation of forgotten crops. Her current doctoral study at Kew Gardens focuses on “pillas”, weaving historical insights into revival efforts, in collaboration with farmers, scientists, historians and others.
By Harriet Gendall
“Pillas”—wrote Robert Morton Nance in 1930— “smaller than oats and without husk, was formerly a common crop in Cornwall, but seems now to have become quite extinct.”
Bound inside a centuries-old herbarium volume at the University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections are four burnished feather-like panicles, collected “neere Land’s End” in 1667 by John Ray and Francis Willoughby. There at the “extreme corner of Cornwall”—Ray said—this grain was cultivated abundantly, sold at a price no less than wheat, and called by the country people “pillis” and “pill-corn”.
Pillas thrived on marginal land and was often the “farewell crop”—the last sown in a rotation. With thin papery husks its grain needed no dehulling. Roasted over a slow fire and ground in granite “traffs”, its flour boiled with milk made a hearty porridge known as ‘pillas-gerts’—once a dietary mainstay of the Cornish working class. Pillas was fed to livestock both thrashed and in the sheaf, and its fine straw was woven into bonnets and rope to tie down thatch. But by the mid-nineteenth century it was gone from Cornish fields. “The last crop I saw harvested”—wrote J.H. Thomas of St Just in Penwith—was in 1867 in Sancreed”.
My grandad, like Nance—whose Cornish to English dictionary he helped prepare—was something of a polymath. Dad described him last month—on what would have been his 100th birthday—as: “linguist, scholar, teacher, songwriter, lexicographer, planter of trees, dreamer of dreams”. To this I would add ‘cultural revivalist’. The motto of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies that he and Nance had been active in— ‘gather ye fragments that are left that nothing be lost’—describes the spirit in which they took an interest both in the latent language of their forefathers, and in this unassuming grain.
I first learned about pillas while home in Cornwall and visiting grandad and his wife Jan—a folklorist—in April 2017 on his 93rd and sadly last birthday. Recounting my recent Master’s research on the ‘lost’ Andean root crop ‘mauka’ (Mirabilis expansa) in Peru—Jan interjected: “Of course you know Cornwall has its own lost crop?” To my astonishment she led me outside to a patch of thin green spears emerging through a bird-proof grill, bordered by yellow cowslips. Its name was “pillas”, she said, and gave me a pot of seedlings. Suffice to say, several years and one global pandemic later, pillas became the focus of my PhD.
As an ethnobotanical researcher I explore people-plant relationships. Their shaping and re-shaping over time fascinates me, most of all in relation to food. An endangered oat might sound absurd, but modern varieties bred for yield and uniformity have displaced many of the world’s traditional crops, and with them much biocultural diversity. Re-rooting them in our foodscapes offers the potential to re-diversify fields, improve nutrition, reduce inputs, empower small-scale farmers, and re-enliven local cultures.
But this is not the straightforward, romantic lost-and-found story it might seem. I soon discovered that the seedlings I inherited on grandad’s birthday were not pillas, but a larger-seeded huskless type which it closely resembles, misidentified and sent to Jan by the Welsh Plant Breeding Station in the late ‘80s. This so-called ‘large naked oat’ had evolved separately, arriving in Western Europe in the early 1800s from its native China/Mongolia, from which stemmed centuries of confusion over the two. Disentangling spurious seeds and muddled accounts, I was a detective on a case of mistaken botanical identity, chronicler of a ‘tale of two naked oats’.
This sprawling history has been a maze to navigate, and for a long while every ‘ah-ha’ research moment seemed to throw more into question. But visits to many archives and herbaria, countless discussions with collaborators, and a thorough exploration of names and toponyms have been illuminating. It transpires that the small naked oat was not Cornwall’s ‘own lost crop’. Once cultivated in various parts of Britain and Ireland, it was last reported in “isolated districts” of Co. Galway and Co. Kerry in the 1930s. Today long-forgotten by farmers, fieldnames referring to it—the oldest recorded in 12th century Staffordshire, and examples in the Monts d'Arrée in Brittany —embed its memory further north and south. Pillas was not unique to my homeland, but Cornish accounts are by far the richest I have come across to date.
Remarkably, pillas did survive. Considered a botanical curiosity, it passed through botanists’ hands over several centuries, later making its way into seed banks. Studying this material, collaborators at the University of Aberystwyth have shown it to comprise just two genetic types. Although probably a tiny fraction of its former diversity, this precious seed presents an opportunity.
Starting in 2021 with just a few handfuls acquired from genebanks in Europe and North America, seed was bulked up in 2022 through the establishment of Loveland Community Grains and with help from Gothelney Farm in Somerset. Last year around 20kg of beautiful grain and 160kg of straw were harvested across trial plots on six Cornish farms. Sickled by farmers and volunteers over six dry end-of-summer evenings, the long shadows of stooked pillas sheaves fell across fields in West Penwith for the first time in over 150 years. We had been lucky to steal a gap in the almost incessant rain. But unlike then, there was no means of thrashing them on the farm.
Via numerous car- and van- loads, sheaves were shipped to a polytunnel in Stithians where they were dried and weighed, and later to the site of Cornish Golden Grains near St Austell. There Will Radmore and his Dad Roger tinkered with a small 1980s-1990s MF 8 Sampa combine ‘til it worked as a stationary thresher. A conventional combine would have swallowed up our modest harvest, but calibrating the Sampa so the small light grain was not blown out was difficult. Compromising on retaining seed, but also much straw and husk, the final clean was accomplished by the IBERS team at Aberystwyth, and their trial plot scale equipment.
Sampling the fruits of our labour diffused the challenges of processing this unorthodox cereal. Following a nineteenth century recipe for ‘pillas-gerts’—recorded by Cornish folk-storyteller William Bottrell—I made pillas flour. From this I baked six triumphant cakes—one for each farmer taking part in the trials—folding windfall apples and stem ginger into the rich brown batter. The future of pillas remains uncertain, but it tastes bloody good. Given the increasing unpredictability of climate and resources, its ability to thrive in low-nutrient, wet and exposed conditions should not be overlooked, despite it yielding lower in grain than modern cereals. Meanwhile, interest in the large naked oat is on the rise, grown regeneratively as a wholegrain and for oat milk, spurred on by UK farmers, bakers, plant breeders active in the non-commodity grains movement. Both naked oats persistently intertwine and exploring them in parallel has been insightful.
Complex and ambiguous—yet rooted in hope—the story of pillas reflects both the challenges and opportunities of recovering eroded biocultural diversity in today’s world. Getting to know this elusive grain has been, admittedly, obsessive. Over the years I have connected intimately to it—making it my research ‘subject’, fixated on bringing it back to life—but I’m increasingly conscious that I’m not the sole orchestrater of this quest. A friend and I recently watched The Botany of Desire, a documentary flipping the assumption that humans alone drive domestication; revealing—in a plant’s-eye twist—how we bend over backwards to propagate and consume crops. Articulating a feeling already in my bones, my friend turned to me and said: “It seems pillas is putting you to work”.
“Pillas”—wrote Robert Morton Nance in 1930— “smaller than oats and without husk, was formerly a common crop in Cornwall, but seems now to have become quite extinct.”
Bound inside a centuries-old herbarium volume at the University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections are four burnished feather-like panicles, collected “neere Land’s End” in 1667 by John Ray and Francis Willoughby. There at the “extreme corner of Cornwall”—Ray said—this grain was cultivated abundantly, sold at a price no less than wheat, and called by the country people “pillis” and “pill-corn”.
Pillas thrived on marginal land and was often the “farewell crop”—the last sown in a rotation. With thin papery husks its grain needed no dehulling. Roasted over a slow fire and ground in granite “traffs”, its flour boiled with milk made a hearty porridge known as ‘pillas-gerts’—once a dietary mainstay of the Cornish working class. Pillas was fed to livestock both thrashed and in the sheaf, and its fine straw was woven into bonnets and rope to tie down thatch. But by the mid-nineteenth century it was gone from Cornish fields. “The last crop I saw harvested”—wrote J.H. Thomas of St Just in Penwith—was in 1867 in Sancreed”.
My grandad, like Nance—whose Cornish to English dictionary he helped prepare—was something of a polymath. Dad described him last month—on what would have been his 100th birthday—as: “linguist, scholar, teacher, songwriter, lexicographer, planter of trees, dreamer of dreams”. To this I would add ‘cultural revivalist’. The motto of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies that he and Nance had been active in— ‘gather ye fragments that are left that nothing be lost’—describes the spirit in which they took an interest both in the latent language of their forefathers, and in this unassuming grain.
I first learned about pillas while home in Cornwall and visiting grandad and his wife Jan—a folklorist—in April 2017 on his 93rd and sadly last birthday. Recounting my recent Master’s research on the ‘lost’ Andean root crop ‘mauka’ (Mirabilis expansa) in Peru—Jan interjected: “Of course you know Cornwall has its own lost crop?” To my astonishment she led me outside to a patch of thin green spears emerging through a bird-proof grill, bordered by yellow cowslips. Its name was “pillas”, she said, and gave me a pot of seedlings. Suffice to say, several years and one global pandemic later, pillas became the focus of my PhD.
As an ethnobotanical researcher I explore people-plant relationships. Their shaping and re-shaping over time fascinates me, most of all in relation to food. An endangered oat might sound absurd, but modern varieties bred for yield and uniformity have displaced many of the world’s traditional crops, and with them much biocultural diversity. Re-rooting them in our foodscapes offers the potential to re-diversify fields, improve nutrition, reduce inputs, empower small-scale farmers, and re-enliven local cultures.
But this is not the straightforward, romantic lost-and-found story it might seem. I soon discovered that the seedlings I inherited on grandad’s birthday were not pillas, but a larger-seeded huskless type which it closely resembles, misidentified and sent to Jan by the Welsh Plant Breeding Station in the late ‘80s. This so-called ‘large naked oat’ had evolved separately, arriving in Western Europe in the early 1800s from its native China/Mongolia, from which stemmed centuries of confusion over the two. Disentangling spurious seeds and muddled accounts, I was a detective on a case of mistaken botanical identity, chronicler of a ‘tale of two naked oats’.
This sprawling history has been a maze to navigate, and for a long while every ‘ah-ha’ research moment seemed to throw more into question. But visits to many archives and herbaria, countless discussions with collaborators, and a thorough exploration of names and toponyms have been illuminating. It transpires that the small naked oat was not Cornwall’s ‘own lost crop’. Once cultivated in various parts of Britain and Ireland, it was last reported in “isolated districts” of Co. Galway and Co. Kerry in the 1930s. Today long-forgotten by farmers, fieldnames referring to it—the oldest recorded in 12th century Staffordshire, and examples in the Monts d'Arrée in Brittany —embed its memory further north and south. Pillas was not unique to my homeland, but Cornish accounts are by far the richest I have come across to date.
Remarkably, pillas did survive. Considered a botanical curiosity, it passed through botanists’ hands over several centuries, later making its way into seed banks. Studying this material, collaborators at the University of Aberystwyth have shown it to comprise just two genetic types. Although probably a tiny fraction of its former diversity, this precious seed presents an opportunity.
Starting in 2021 with just a few handfuls acquired from genebanks in Europe and North America, seed was bulked up in 2022 through the establishment of Loveland Community Grains and with help from Gothelney Farm in Somerset. Last year around 20kg of beautiful grain and 160kg of straw were harvested across trial plots on six Cornish farms. Sickled by farmers and volunteers over six dry end-of-summer evenings, the long shadows of stooked pillas sheaves fell across fields in West Penwith for the first time in over 150 years. We had been lucky to steal a gap in the almost incessant rain. But unlike then, there was no means of thrashing them on the farm.
Via numerous car- and van- loads, sheaves were shipped to a polytunnel in Stithians where they were dried and weighed, and later to the site of Cornish Golden Grains near St Austell. There Will Radmore and his Dad Roger tinkered with a small 1980s-1990s MF 8 Sampa combine ‘til it worked as a stationary thresher. A conventional combine would have swallowed up our modest harvest, but calibrating the Sampa so the small light grain was not blown out was difficult. Compromising on retaining seed, but also much straw and husk, the final clean was accomplished by the IBERS team at Aberystwyth, and their trial plot scale equipment.
Sampling the fruits of our labour diffused the challenges of processing this unorthodox cereal. Following a nineteenth century recipe for ‘pillas-gerts’—recorded by Cornish folk-storyteller William Bottrell—I made pillas flour. From this I baked six triumphant cakes—one for each farmer taking part in the trials—folding windfall apples and stem ginger into the rich brown batter. The future of pillas remains uncertain, but it tastes bloody good. Given the increasing unpredictability of climate and resources, its ability to thrive in low-nutrient, wet and exposed conditions should not be overlooked, despite it yielding lower in grain than modern cereals. Meanwhile, interest in the large naked oat is on the rise, grown regeneratively as a wholegrain and for oat milk, spurred on by UK farmers, bakers, plant breeders active in the non-commodity grains movement. Both naked oats persistently intertwine and exploring them in parallel has been insightful.
Complex and ambiguous—yet rooted in hope—the story of pillas reflects both the challenges and opportunities of recovering eroded biocultural diversity in today’s world. Getting to know this elusive grain has been, admittedly, obsessive. Over the years I have connected intimately to it—making it my research ‘subject’, fixated on bringing it back to life—but I’m increasingly conscious that I’m not the sole orchestrater of this quest. A friend and I recently watched The Botany of Desire, a documentary flipping the assumption that humans alone drive domestication; revealing—in a plant’s-eye twist—how we bend over backwards to propagate and consume crops. Articulating a feeling already in my bones, my friend turned to me and said: “It seems pillas is putting you to work”.
Harriet Gendall is an ethnobotanical researcher exploring biocultural diversity conservation through the revitalisation of forgotten crops. Her current doctoral study at Kew Gardens focuses on “pillas”, weaving historical insights into revival efforts, in collaboration with farmers, scientists, historians and others.
By Harriet Gendall
“Pillas”—wrote Robert Morton Nance in 1930— “smaller than oats and without husk, was formerly a common crop in Cornwall, but seems now to have become quite extinct.”
Bound inside a centuries-old herbarium volume at the University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections are four burnished feather-like panicles, collected “neere Land’s End” in 1667 by John Ray and Francis Willoughby. There at the “extreme corner of Cornwall”—Ray said—this grain was cultivated abundantly, sold at a price no less than wheat, and called by the country people “pillis” and “pill-corn”.
Pillas thrived on marginal land and was often the “farewell crop”—the last sown in a rotation. With thin papery husks its grain needed no dehulling. Roasted over a slow fire and ground in granite “traffs”, its flour boiled with milk made a hearty porridge known as ‘pillas-gerts’—once a dietary mainstay of the Cornish working class. Pillas was fed to livestock both thrashed and in the sheaf, and its fine straw was woven into bonnets and rope to tie down thatch. But by the mid-nineteenth century it was gone from Cornish fields. “The last crop I saw harvested”—wrote J.H. Thomas of St Just in Penwith—was in 1867 in Sancreed”.
My grandad, like Nance—whose Cornish to English dictionary he helped prepare—was something of a polymath. Dad described him last month—on what would have been his 100th birthday—as: “linguist, scholar, teacher, songwriter, lexicographer, planter of trees, dreamer of dreams”. To this I would add ‘cultural revivalist’. The motto of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies that he and Nance had been active in— ‘gather ye fragments that are left that nothing be lost’—describes the spirit in which they took an interest both in the latent language of their forefathers, and in this unassuming grain.
I first learned about pillas while home in Cornwall and visiting grandad and his wife Jan—a folklorist—in April 2017 on his 93rd and sadly last birthday. Recounting my recent Master’s research on the ‘lost’ Andean root crop ‘mauka’ (Mirabilis expansa) in Peru—Jan interjected: “Of course you know Cornwall has its own lost crop?” To my astonishment she led me outside to a patch of thin green spears emerging through a bird-proof grill, bordered by yellow cowslips. Its name was “pillas”, she said, and gave me a pot of seedlings. Suffice to say, several years and one global pandemic later, pillas became the focus of my PhD.
As an ethnobotanical researcher I explore people-plant relationships. Their shaping and re-shaping over time fascinates me, most of all in relation to food. An endangered oat might sound absurd, but modern varieties bred for yield and uniformity have displaced many of the world’s traditional crops, and with them much biocultural diversity. Re-rooting them in our foodscapes offers the potential to re-diversify fields, improve nutrition, reduce inputs, empower small-scale farmers, and re-enliven local cultures.
But this is not the straightforward, romantic lost-and-found story it might seem. I soon discovered that the seedlings I inherited on grandad’s birthday were not pillas, but a larger-seeded huskless type which it closely resembles, misidentified and sent to Jan by the Welsh Plant Breeding Station in the late ‘80s. This so-called ‘large naked oat’ had evolved separately, arriving in Western Europe in the early 1800s from its native China/Mongolia, from which stemmed centuries of confusion over the two. Disentangling spurious seeds and muddled accounts, I was a detective on a case of mistaken botanical identity, chronicler of a ‘tale of two naked oats’.
This sprawling history has been a maze to navigate, and for a long while every ‘ah-ha’ research moment seemed to throw more into question. But visits to many archives and herbaria, countless discussions with collaborators, and a thorough exploration of names and toponyms have been illuminating. It transpires that the small naked oat was not Cornwall’s ‘own lost crop’. Once cultivated in various parts of Britain and Ireland, it was last reported in “isolated districts” of Co. Galway and Co. Kerry in the 1930s. Today long-forgotten by farmers, fieldnames referring to it—the oldest recorded in 12th century Staffordshire, and examples in the Monts d'Arrée in Brittany —embed its memory further north and south. Pillas was not unique to my homeland, but Cornish accounts are by far the richest I have come across to date.
Remarkably, pillas did survive. Considered a botanical curiosity, it passed through botanists’ hands over several centuries, later making its way into seed banks. Studying this material, collaborators at the University of Aberystwyth have shown it to comprise just two genetic types. Although probably a tiny fraction of its former diversity, this precious seed presents an opportunity.
Starting in 2021 with just a few handfuls acquired from genebanks in Europe and North America, seed was bulked up in 2022 through the establishment of Loveland Community Grains and with help from Gothelney Farm in Somerset. Last year around 20kg of beautiful grain and 160kg of straw were harvested across trial plots on six Cornish farms. Sickled by farmers and volunteers over six dry end-of-summer evenings, the long shadows of stooked pillas sheaves fell across fields in West Penwith for the first time in over 150 years. We had been lucky to steal a gap in the almost incessant rain. But unlike then, there was no means of thrashing them on the farm.
Via numerous car- and van- loads, sheaves were shipped to a polytunnel in Stithians where they were dried and weighed, and later to the site of Cornish Golden Grains near St Austell. There Will Radmore and his Dad Roger tinkered with a small 1980s-1990s MF 8 Sampa combine ‘til it worked as a stationary thresher. A conventional combine would have swallowed up our modest harvest, but calibrating the Sampa so the small light grain was not blown out was difficult. Compromising on retaining seed, but also much straw and husk, the final clean was accomplished by the IBERS team at Aberystwyth, and their trial plot scale equipment.
Sampling the fruits of our labour diffused the challenges of processing this unorthodox cereal. Following a nineteenth century recipe for ‘pillas-gerts’—recorded by Cornish folk-storyteller William Bottrell—I made pillas flour. From this I baked six triumphant cakes—one for each farmer taking part in the trials—folding windfall apples and stem ginger into the rich brown batter. The future of pillas remains uncertain, but it tastes bloody good. Given the increasing unpredictability of climate and resources, its ability to thrive in low-nutrient, wet and exposed conditions should not be overlooked, despite it yielding lower in grain than modern cereals. Meanwhile, interest in the large naked oat is on the rise, grown regeneratively as a wholegrain and for oat milk, spurred on by UK farmers, bakers, plant breeders active in the non-commodity grains movement. Both naked oats persistently intertwine and exploring them in parallel has been insightful.
Complex and ambiguous—yet rooted in hope—the story of pillas reflects both the challenges and opportunities of recovering eroded biocultural diversity in today’s world. Getting to know this elusive grain has been, admittedly, obsessive. Over the years I have connected intimately to it—making it my research ‘subject’, fixated on bringing it back to life—but I’m increasingly conscious that I’m not the sole orchestrater of this quest. A friend and I recently watched The Botany of Desire, a documentary flipping the assumption that humans alone drive domestication; revealing—in a plant’s-eye twist—how we bend over backwards to propagate and consume crops. Articulating a feeling already in my bones, my friend turned to me and said: “It seems pillas is putting you to work”.
“Pillas”—wrote Robert Morton Nance in 1930— “smaller than oats and without husk, was formerly a common crop in Cornwall, but seems now to have become quite extinct.”
Bound inside a centuries-old herbarium volume at the University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections are four burnished feather-like panicles, collected “neere Land’s End” in 1667 by John Ray and Francis Willoughby. There at the “extreme corner of Cornwall”—Ray said—this grain was cultivated abundantly, sold at a price no less than wheat, and called by the country people “pillis” and “pill-corn”.
Pillas thrived on marginal land and was often the “farewell crop”—the last sown in a rotation. With thin papery husks its grain needed no dehulling. Roasted over a slow fire and ground in granite “traffs”, its flour boiled with milk made a hearty porridge known as ‘pillas-gerts’—once a dietary mainstay of the Cornish working class. Pillas was fed to livestock both thrashed and in the sheaf, and its fine straw was woven into bonnets and rope to tie down thatch. But by the mid-nineteenth century it was gone from Cornish fields. “The last crop I saw harvested”—wrote J.H. Thomas of St Just in Penwith—was in 1867 in Sancreed”.
My grandad, like Nance—whose Cornish to English dictionary he helped prepare—was something of a polymath. Dad described him last month—on what would have been his 100th birthday—as: “linguist, scholar, teacher, songwriter, lexicographer, planter of trees, dreamer of dreams”. To this I would add ‘cultural revivalist’. The motto of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies that he and Nance had been active in— ‘gather ye fragments that are left that nothing be lost’—describes the spirit in which they took an interest both in the latent language of their forefathers, and in this unassuming grain.
I first learned about pillas while home in Cornwall and visiting grandad and his wife Jan—a folklorist—in April 2017 on his 93rd and sadly last birthday. Recounting my recent Master’s research on the ‘lost’ Andean root crop ‘mauka’ (Mirabilis expansa) in Peru—Jan interjected: “Of course you know Cornwall has its own lost crop?” To my astonishment she led me outside to a patch of thin green spears emerging through a bird-proof grill, bordered by yellow cowslips. Its name was “pillas”, she said, and gave me a pot of seedlings. Suffice to say, several years and one global pandemic later, pillas became the focus of my PhD.
As an ethnobotanical researcher I explore people-plant relationships. Their shaping and re-shaping over time fascinates me, most of all in relation to food. An endangered oat might sound absurd, but modern varieties bred for yield and uniformity have displaced many of the world’s traditional crops, and with them much biocultural diversity. Re-rooting them in our foodscapes offers the potential to re-diversify fields, improve nutrition, reduce inputs, empower small-scale farmers, and re-enliven local cultures.
But this is not the straightforward, romantic lost-and-found story it might seem. I soon discovered that the seedlings I inherited on grandad’s birthday were not pillas, but a larger-seeded huskless type which it closely resembles, misidentified and sent to Jan by the Welsh Plant Breeding Station in the late ‘80s. This so-called ‘large naked oat’ had evolved separately, arriving in Western Europe in the early 1800s from its native China/Mongolia, from which stemmed centuries of confusion over the two. Disentangling spurious seeds and muddled accounts, I was a detective on a case of mistaken botanical identity, chronicler of a ‘tale of two naked oats’.
This sprawling history has been a maze to navigate, and for a long while every ‘ah-ha’ research moment seemed to throw more into question. But visits to many archives and herbaria, countless discussions with collaborators, and a thorough exploration of names and toponyms have been illuminating. It transpires that the small naked oat was not Cornwall’s ‘own lost crop’. Once cultivated in various parts of Britain and Ireland, it was last reported in “isolated districts” of Co. Galway and Co. Kerry in the 1930s. Today long-forgotten by farmers, fieldnames referring to it—the oldest recorded in 12th century Staffordshire, and examples in the Monts d'Arrée in Brittany —embed its memory further north and south. Pillas was not unique to my homeland, but Cornish accounts are by far the richest I have come across to date.
Remarkably, pillas did survive. Considered a botanical curiosity, it passed through botanists’ hands over several centuries, later making its way into seed banks. Studying this material, collaborators at the University of Aberystwyth have shown it to comprise just two genetic types. Although probably a tiny fraction of its former diversity, this precious seed presents an opportunity.
Starting in 2021 with just a few handfuls acquired from genebanks in Europe and North America, seed was bulked up in 2022 through the establishment of Loveland Community Grains and with help from Gothelney Farm in Somerset. Last year around 20kg of beautiful grain and 160kg of straw were harvested across trial plots on six Cornish farms. Sickled by farmers and volunteers over six dry end-of-summer evenings, the long shadows of stooked pillas sheaves fell across fields in West Penwith for the first time in over 150 years. We had been lucky to steal a gap in the almost incessant rain. But unlike then, there was no means of thrashing them on the farm.
Via numerous car- and van- loads, sheaves were shipped to a polytunnel in Stithians where they were dried and weighed, and later to the site of Cornish Golden Grains near St Austell. There Will Radmore and his Dad Roger tinkered with a small 1980s-1990s MF 8 Sampa combine ‘til it worked as a stationary thresher. A conventional combine would have swallowed up our modest harvest, but calibrating the Sampa so the small light grain was not blown out was difficult. Compromising on retaining seed, but also much straw and husk, the final clean was accomplished by the IBERS team at Aberystwyth, and their trial plot scale equipment.
Sampling the fruits of our labour diffused the challenges of processing this unorthodox cereal. Following a nineteenth century recipe for ‘pillas-gerts’—recorded by Cornish folk-storyteller William Bottrell—I made pillas flour. From this I baked six triumphant cakes—one for each farmer taking part in the trials—folding windfall apples and stem ginger into the rich brown batter. The future of pillas remains uncertain, but it tastes bloody good. Given the increasing unpredictability of climate and resources, its ability to thrive in low-nutrient, wet and exposed conditions should not be overlooked, despite it yielding lower in grain than modern cereals. Meanwhile, interest in the large naked oat is on the rise, grown regeneratively as a wholegrain and for oat milk, spurred on by UK farmers, bakers, plant breeders active in the non-commodity grains movement. Both naked oats persistently intertwine and exploring them in parallel has been insightful.
Complex and ambiguous—yet rooted in hope—the story of pillas reflects both the challenges and opportunities of recovering eroded biocultural diversity in today’s world. Getting to know this elusive grain has been, admittedly, obsessive. Over the years I have connected intimately to it—making it my research ‘subject’, fixated on bringing it back to life—but I’m increasingly conscious that I’m not the sole orchestrater of this quest. A friend and I recently watched The Botany of Desire, a documentary flipping the assumption that humans alone drive domestication; revealing—in a plant’s-eye twist—how we bend over backwards to propagate and consume crops. Articulating a feeling already in my bones, my friend turned to me and said: “It seems pillas is putting you to work”.
Harriet Gendall is an ethnobotanical researcher exploring biocultural diversity conservation through the revitalisation of forgotten crops. Her current doctoral study at Kew Gardens focuses on “pillas”, weaving historical insights into revival efforts, in collaboration with farmers, scientists, historians and others.