Helston Flora Day

My in-laws live in the gritty Cornish town of Helston and so I visit fairly frequently, but up until now I've never made it down for Flora Day to see the Furry Dance (on or around May 8th).

Locals and shopkeepers festoon the place with flowers (it is, apparently, the only place in Britain where it's legal to pick bluebells, so no letters please).

This is the famous Blue Anchor pub, home of the notoriously strong Spingo Ale. Here, I'm told, you can take the Spingo Challenge. If you can down, and keep down, ten pints of the stuff, and exit without touching the wall, then the pub is yours. Needless to say, no one has ever succeeded.

Flora Day actually consists of two events. The Hal-an-Tow starts at 8.30am. It's a curious mix. It's part 1930s pageant (which is when it was revived, having been discouraged by those humourless Victorians)...

It's part Cornish Nationalist rally, with a declaration in Cornish, some (good-humoured) jibes directed at the English, and plenty of Oggy Oggy Oggying...

It's part Mystery or Mummer's play, with tableau quickly enacted to illustrate the words of the famous Hal-an-Tow song, belted out with gusto...

And it's part neo-pagan ritual celebrating the return of the spring...

Despite the Cornish mizzle, I found it uplifting and moving. The enthusiasm of the participants and the delight with which they enacted their parts were infectious.

Then there is the Furry Dance itself. According to Ronald Hutton, the first mention of any Mayish activities in Helston is in 1600, but the dance is the last surviving Cornish Processional Dance (of which there were once many). It became popular, and formalised, in the nineteenth century, a legacy that remains, giving it the feel of something out of Trumpton. 

There are four dances throughout the day, each processing right round the town and in and out of select shops and houses. They're driven along by the Helston Town Band playing that tune.

If it's a contender for the most irritating tune ever written then that's only because some of us are old enough to remember Terry Wogan's ghastly 1978 chart-topping rendition of the song (which is a later addition). In fact the tune is full of pomp and brilliantly infectious. It echoes round the streets and does the job of spurring the dancers on.

All the local school kids appear in the Children's Dance, the teenagers with rather less enthusiasm than the youngsters.

But the main event is the Furry Dance itself. It's as if Ascot Ladies Day was suddenly and inexplicably possessed by the spirit of Pan.

In some ways I preferred Helston to Padstow. The boundary between insider and outsider was less rigorously defended and consequently I felt more able to partake in that feeling of festival effervescence. Yes, it's quirky and at times distinctly odd... 

 

But as ever, my heart lifts when, no matter the occasion, the bunting comes out and people take to the streets.

Lustleigh May Day

After the drunken raucousness of Padstow, Lustleigh May Day on Dartmoor seems positively sedate. And yet this quintessentially English event has a quiet charm of its very own.

Morris dancers leap in front of picture-perfect thatched cottages.

There are the traditional games you'd expect of a village fete.

A town crier acts as MC, his sense of humour as dry as the local scrumpy.

There's a marching band...

...but everything centres on the May pole...

...and the crowning of a May Queen, a girl chosen from the village. She's paraded around the village in a specially created bower...

...before being crowned on a stone throne atop a great hunk of granite. Her name will be carved there, alongside the names of all previous Queens. The list goes back to 1954 (though the first Queen was crowned in 1903).

Then children dance around the May Pole to jigs and reels provided by  a local scratch band.

You can't help willing it to turn into the famous May Pole scene from The Wicker Man but both the event itself, and the idea that folk customs are the relics of ancient paganism, are Edwardian conceits. Lustleigh May Day is a survival from a forgotten age, but one dating only to the early 1900s. Yes, it's super-twee but sitting in the sunshine, eating a cream tea, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more English way to celebrate the May.

Oss Oss Wee Oss!

This May Day, we went down to Cornwall, to Padstow, to see the traditional 'Obby 'Oss procession. There are in fact two 'Osses, red and blue, but it's the red that claims to be the oldest and original. 

A crowd gathers in the narrow streets outside the Golden Lion pub. People seize whatever vantage points they can.

Eventually about four hundred accordion players process out of the pub, followed by as many drummers again. The noise is awful, in the original sense of that word. It inspires awe.

They play one tune and one tune only, all day long. 

Locals sing the traditional song. Watchers mumble from crib sheets. Unite and unite and let us all unite for summer is acome unto day, and whither we are going, we will all unite in the merry morning of May.

And then, quick as a flash, the 'Oss is out, through the narrow pub door and onto the street. The crowd roars: " 'Oss 'Oss, wee 'Oss!" The 'Oss responds, pitching and yawing, spinning wildly. If it catches a woman under its skirts it's said she'll be pregnant before the year's out.

A Teaser dances and cavorts in front of it like a toreador, spurring it on to greater antics. Different people take the roles of 'Oss and Teaser, and it's clearly something of an honour to be asked.

And, of course, Doc Rowe is there to film it all.

The 'Oss is a strange beast, more like something from Africa than Europe. I find it a little unnerving. Scary even. It doesn't look like a horse at all.

And then, before you know it, it's off and away, up the streets. Wherever you go through the town you hear the pounding drums.

Whatever strange magic this folk ritual performs, keeping the fish harvest sweet and the storms at bay, bumping up the birth rate, or proclaiming a sense of local identity against the relentless tide of second homers and David Cameron wannabes, the magic worked. The clouds lifted and the sun shone.