Book of Kells Project: Donn with Chestnut

 It's a very bad pun.   

"Donn" is Irish for brown and sounds like "down" in some dialects.

Yep.  Ní duine greannmhar mé.  Moving along...

Chestnuts are a staple I forage for in the fall.  I use them in stews, cakes and stuffing.  When boiling them during processing, the liquid was always dark brown.  Surely this could be used for ink or something, right?

Well, yes. Any nut with tannin can be processed with iron salts to produce ink.  Chestnut is less dramatic than oak galls or acorns, but it does work.  The color isn't black, but a warm dark brown.  Which is useful when you need brown.

 

Chestnut ink was a nice accent.  It also served as a substitution for the lack of any purple from the orchil disaster.  Really would have liked that...

As an aside, dark brown in the manuscript is attributed to iron gall ink.  But I wonder if this just isn't age or a reaction with the vellum substrate?   Because my oak tannin based ink is BLACK.  But I could imagine it might shift tone with age.