When I was a boy growing up in Helston, Cornwall, Flora Day - May the 8th - was the biggest day of the year. And the most fun part of the whole celebration was the Hal-An-Tow - a riotous mumming play that wakes the town up (I blogged about it here).
The Hal-An-Tow has a cast of distinct characters - the dragon, the demon, St Michael, St Piran etc. and a chorus of people dressed in diaphanous blue dresses to represent the sea, or the Green Man to represent the spirit of the woods and the arrival of Spring. To accompany them there are Spaniards and pirates, banner carriers, bell ringers and lads and lasses carrying branches of leafy sycamore to be shaken and thumped on the ground as the chorus to the Hal-An-Tow song is sung.
You can get a sense of it from some these photos I took in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
But why the sycamore?
That's not an easy question to answer.
Unlike the oak and the ash and other native trees that have lore attached to them that goes back thousands of years, the sycamore is a relative newcomer. It's not even a native tree, having arrived here around 600 years ago and found conditions very much to its liking. It's a form of maple and it spreads like a weed - mainly thanks to its hardy helicopter seeds that can travel great distances. As kids we used to have races with them.
But despite its recent arrival it does seem to have attracted some interest at the extremes of the UK.
If we travel to Scotland and the legendary Rosyln Chapel - famous for its connection to the Knights Templar (and Dan Brown books) - we find many sycamore trees. And not accidentally either - they were planted in groves and avenues. And exactly five miles due south of Roslyn there is a low hill called Mount Lothian that is topped with a grove of thirteen sycamores. The thirteenth tree is set off-centre and has been struck by lightning. In the centre of the grove is the ruin of a 14th century chapel and it was here that William Wallace was knighted. Whoever planted these Sycamores obviously saw them as special enough to mark the site.
Meanwhile, in my native Cornwall they do play an important part in May Day festivities. In Helston, at least, the use of sycamore is over 100 years old. A 1909 account records that:
'On the first of May young people went into the country calling at farmhouses en route, where they were refreshed with milk, cream, and junket. They then proceeded to gather 'May' or sycamore branches, out of which they made whistles and peweeps, by deftly removing circular pieces of bark. With these as instruments of music, the party returned to the town, bearing aloft huge branches of `May'. Although this old custom has long died out, most country boys still know how to make the whistles and peweeps. In the neighbourhood of Helston old folk continue to speak of Flora Day as Faddy Day, and those who go into the country for branches of sycamore or `May' as having gone 'a-faddying'. As a result sycamore was locally known as the whistle-tree, peweep-tree, faddy-tree or May. Between the first two dances a folk play, known as the Hal-an-Tow, is performed. At least some of the participants in this play carry large sycamore branches, and the 'houses and public buildings are decorated with branches of sycamore and beech, flowers, and evergreens'.
Mention of the whistles is another fond memory. Both my Dad and my maternal grandfather could make one from a piece of sycamore and we blew them loud and long during the Hal-An-Tow. I've made them too and if you want to know how, watch this (although you'll have to wait until the Spring to do it - the wood isn't soft to carve and 'sappy' enough at this time of year to slide the bark off):
And in Wales it's the traditional wood used for making intricately carved love spoons.
It may not be 100% British in origin but it's well and truly a Celtic tree now.
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