May Day Madness

The UK goes a little mad on May Day. 

While watching the Whitchurch Morris dancers on Coombe Hill yesterday, I got chatting to a chap who runs a site called Folk England. He's a photographer and he's set himself the impossible task of capturing every event. 

And it really is impossible. Just May Day would take a lifetime of travelling. Almost every town and village celebrated in some way yesterday, it seems. 

Of course, there are the well-known events like the Deptford Jack-in-the-Green and the Padstow Obby Oss.

And also the Minehead Hobby Horse and the Hastings Jack-in-the-Green parade.

In Penzance they chased the Devil away with a parade of noisy May horns led by a giant crow. In Falmouth, they held a Beltane fire ceremony featuring Pen Hood, the Montol beast. And in Cerne Abbas, the Wessex Morris men led the terrifying Dorset Ooser out to dance at dawn and to welcome in the May.

And then there's the ...

I could list a thousand events and I still wouldn't have covered them all.

So why do people do these things? 

Well, it's not about faith or religion for starters. 

It's more about tradition, identity and belonging. Towns are very possessive of their unique identity and events of this nature bring people together to reinforce that identity. It's one of the few occasions (except sport maybe) when you get completely cross-generational involvement - old and young participate equally. 

I think that Brian Day sums it up perfectly in his 1998 book, A Chronicle of Folk Customs: 

'People celebrate folk customs for many reasons. Some do so because they have always done so, and do not necessarily remember why they started; some wish to express their belonging to the community and want to preserve its character, distinctiveness and history; some participate for sheer enjoyment; some see such involvement as a release from their stressful, regulated lives; and undoubtedly some have personal, unannounced reasons.’ 

These things are important, as Gustav Mahler noted: ‘Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.’

Long may it burn.