A Paganesque Moveable Feast - Abbots Bromley Horn Dance

A run-down of the pagan gatherings and pagan-like festivals from other parts of the world.

By Tania Poole

Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is believed to have been running since the Barthelmy Fair, granted to the Abbots of Burton by Henry III in 1226, celebrating Bartholomew’s Day – August 24^th. The changing of the Julian Calender in 1752 has moved the Fair to the beginning of September, and the Fair became one day, rather than three days. Yet the horns have been dated to centuries before - the 11^th century – and being reindeer antlers, they obviously came from Scandinavia, probably down the River Trent and into the Staffordshire region.

The Horn dance day is always held on a Monday – Here is how you remember which day it is on. It’s always ‘the Monday following the first Sunday after the fourth of September’ – remember that folks, many a person has turned up on the wrong Monday and been disappointed…..

So I managed to go to the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance. My friend Steve goes every year, and has done since 1989. So when I thought I could go, I emailed Steve about it, he told me he could not go, but told me how much it was going to cost me to go via public transport. It did not seem worth it, considering if I had to travel there myself, funds were low, and I had plane tickets to buy.  But then Steve changed his mind, saying he would be able to go and help me pay for my travel there. Suddenly that was it – I was going! I also have a new friend that I met only this year. Shamus, an accordion player who plays for the Black Pig Border Morris Team, and is also dating my friend Angela. Shamus has played accordion for the Horn Dancers for over 2 decades now! It's all about who you know!!! 

I met Steve at Wakefield station at 10am, and we made our way south to Derby, then to Uttoxeter where a cab driver was waiting for us – Steve books him every year, so he knows him personally. From there, the village was about a 15 – 20 min drive away.

In Abbots Bromley, you found yourself in a relatively untouched village – a typical Staffordshire village at that – with not much changed. Some of the buildings here still are certainly medieval. We were dropped off at the Buttercross – a hexagonal shaped building near the green that was used for market day over many centuries – I’ve seen one other like it in Bungay. This one is more medieval looking, the Bungay one looks Georgian. Someone there that day told me what a Buttercross was – at market, it was where people bought butter, milk and eggs.

We visited a pagan art stall – a longhaired, bearded attractive man named Chris Bell, selling his pagan art (mostly green men) in the market and I bought a few as gifts for people back home. After that we had our first pint at the Goat’s Head pub, and met some of Steve’s pagan friends there. Great chats with people I’d just met, who had good stories to tell. Even Steve had stories to tell about his annual jaunts to Abbots Bromley. As he’s been coming since 1989, he had a few tales, and I think, could write a book about the goings on that he had witnessed over the years – the pagan camps, the large and small crowds, the popularity of the event, and how they’ve evolved. One story he told was about how he and his pagan friends were sitting in the pub or somewhere and a tradesman came along and asked them about runes – he had seen some around the village – under the tiles of the old roofs and houses – dating back centuries, probably even the middle ages. They had been scratched into the architecture of the old buildings – some of these probably not repaired for many centuries. Sketching the runes for the pagans, the tradesman was told they may have been symbols of protection upon the house. Kind of reminds me of the concealed shoes superstition. Now THAT would be good article.

 

 

After our pint, we went to the old Church House – that is certainly medieval or even later, but definitely one of the oldest houses in the village. They put on a great spread there – sandwiches and cakes to eat, and endless tea – we had our lunch there – well, a small lunch, we also ate more later on.

The Old Church House where we had lunch

 

Steve took me to the St Nicholas Parish Church to see where the horns are kept. I could tell by looking at it, parts of it were Saxon, and like all Saxon churches, had been added to over the years, especially in the Norman times. Saxon and Norman buildings go together a lot here. This one was quite a lovely church. The bars that hang the horns up are there, and even the old hobby horse from years ago – I’ve seen old images from the 70’s of that hobby horse being ridden about the place – it says that the horse is from the Middle Ages – could it actually be that old? I often hold doubt of things like this – what looks medieval, could have been made as recently as the nineteenth century. They use a new one in the dance now. There were also glass cabinets holding the regalia and costumes of horn dancers past.

 

There was also a story from Steve about the pagans who actually came to church services in previous Horn dance weekends, in their velvet robes and pentacles, and sat in the front row, much to the annoyance of the vicar. The Christian locals preferred to sit up the back as far away from the pagans as possible. Would have loved to have seen that.

In the churchyard, the ground surrounding the church was raised, as if it was small pre-Christian mound. It makes us wonder if indeed a Saxon church was here, maybe something before it existed. Steve also showed me a headstone, belonging to a man that was once a leader of the horn dancers – and it says that on his headstone. He belonged to the Fowell family, and they are the official horn dancers – their family and another one are the only members that are allowed to dance, and have been for many, many generations.  Steve also told me about another friend of his and a visitor to the Horn Dance day would spend the night in the graveyard because he had nowhere else to sleep. And people and locals did not mind – he was just the ‘guy who slept in the graveyard.’ Oh Boy! The characters you get at these events.

We walked up the street to the Bagot Arms, passing some of the places where Steve says the dancers stop for a pint, or food. In the Bagot Arms, Steve and I had another pint and we chatted about many other things – pagans in the UK and Australia, folk dancing, horse brasses, and many other things that crossed our minds. I kept seeing more and more people walking past the pub window, as I realised the tourists were arriving. It was probably about 3.00 - 3.30pm by now, and the dancers were due to arrive in the village. After a toilet run, I went outside to find Steve standing there, prompting me along. As I looked west down the road, I saw the dancers skipping along the road with their horns. I got really excited here – this was it! I was finally going to see this horn dance. It all dawned on me where I was when I saw them. I began to not believe that I was here!

As they came along, they circled around each other, and I saw my Staffordshire friend Shamus playing the accordion, who acknowledged me and gave me a head bow. I began to take some short footage of the dance, and Angela, the leader of my border morris team back in Yorkshire, was in the background. She saw me and came around to give me a hug. After this dance the dancers went under an arch and out into the backyard of one of their friends who had put on a bit of food. Steve suggested we walk back into the village, and before we walked off, Ang invited us out the back with the dancers to hang out with Shamus. The four of us got some group photos together and then went further out the back to the lawn to watch some of the dancers dance with some locals. They are a more open folk dance than I thought. You think about Padstow and how only locals can go to the May Day Festival because the tourists ‘clogged the village.’ And the Morris Ring who have men-only sides who refuse to let women join, but here in Abbots Bromley, they let locals dance and WOMEN too! What a nice bunch of people! Not superstitious about a woman holding the horns let alone having a dance!

 



Me with Shamus and Angela, who is the
squire of my morris team

 

 

 

After that, we followed the dancers out to the street again and walked along as we watched them head to the Bagot Arms back towards the village. At this car park, Shamus dragged me over to where the horns were laid on the ground, and shoved a set of horns into my hands. I was holding the lighter horns that were damaged in the mid 70’s and the broken bit was dated to have been from around 1060s. I made sure veteran attendee Steve got to hold them as well.

me with some horns

Steven with the horns

We headed back towards the Buttercross, running into more pagan friends of Steve on the way and stopping for chats. At the Crown Pub, we went inside to see the new décor of the renovated pub – all modern and new, and saw the Horn Dance paintings done in the 1940s. Then we went round the back of the pub and visited the pagan camp site up the back – I saw Nick from the Black Pigs Border Morris and went to say hello to him by his hearse. Then we got a hotdog outside the front of the Crown and then stood with more of Steve’s friends, Cathy and Robin. It was now when the horn dancers had made their way down into the village and arrived outside the Goat’s Head and held up the traffic doing their road-hogging dance. Then they rested by the Goat’s Head and let friends dance with them.

 

 

 

I chatted to friends Ang, Fran, and Shamus, and Steve and his friends joined us. I visited the stalls again and bought some Horn Dancer pins. Then the dancers went out the back of the Goat’s Head and posed for photos. We stayed back there in the large beer garden until about 6pm, then headed back to the Crown. It was time for Steve and I to get back to the station, so we looked for our cab. I could not find Ang or Shamus at all, so never got to say goodbye. It was the last time I saw Shamus too. Our cab was waiting when it started to rain again. We got the train from Uttoxeter to Derby and then caught one home to Leeds - finally on our separate ways home, and with a few train cancellation issues, Steve and I made it safely home.

 

I had an awesome and memorable day at Abbots Bromley and am very glad I got to go. It was magic! And brilliant to witness such an old dance and finally see how it was conducted, especially since I have been going to folk dances all year. Getting to know so many people apart from Steve in England has been wonderful, meeting Shamus in March and becoming friends with him, and then learning that he was the accordion player for the Horn Dancers absolutely blew my mind! What are the chances of such a meeting! I had such a wonderful day!

Even now, after six months, I am still reeling from the experience. I had always dreamed of going, and never thought I actually would! Thanks to Steve Jones, Shamus O'Blivion, and Angela Boycott-Garnett.

A Paganesque Moveable Feast - The Marsden Imbolc Fire Festival (MIFF)

A run-down of the pagan gatherings and pagan-like festivals from other parts of the world.

As some of you know, just after our lovely Beltane at Mount Franklin 2011, I left the country to travel to the Uk to work for a year. Seeing I am observing many festivals while I am here, i thought I'd do a report on many of them. There seems to be so many amazingly organised events here in England and I have learned many things at these events that I plan to bring home.

I have had the fortune to live in Marsden since I arrived in the UK. I did not know about it beforehand, indeed it was just another village in west West Yorkshire to me, but since I have come here I have discovered just what village life is all about. There is an amazing sense of community here, a pagan-friendly, open-minded hamlet in the south-west end of the Colne Valley and its festivals are revered and maintained annually. Every year for 20 years now, there has been an Imbolc fire festival held here.

I also had to fortune of participating in this year’s festival – as a fire twirler. I met and have become friends with the original, and still present organiser, Angela Boycott-Garnett, who also runs the local Morris team, the Thieving Magpies, which I have also joined. Angela appears to organise almost all the local festivals here in Marsden – from when I met her, she was organising the Imbolc festival, and the moment that event ended, it was straight into organising Cuckoo Day (April). Angela is a great lover of English folkloric festivals – attending morris and sword dancing events, Mummers’plays, Rush-cart festivals and anything else where the traditions of Merrie England is possible.

The 2012 MIFF event was held on the 4th of February and on that day, perfect snow fell. Nice and crunchy underfoot. The festival starts in the village near the train station by the Railway pub. Drummers and people masked as foxes walk with lanterns heading a procession towards the Imbolc festival location – the Standedge Visitor Centre. All the people follow in the procession – carrying homemade lanterns made of willow and white tissue paper. Along the road are several lanterns hanging from trees, glowing like little moons. When the procession reaches the visitor centre, they see down from the road, the sight of the fire twirlers on their hill, already performing their synchronized routines.

(that's me top left!)

Earlier, all the fire swingers and performers, in their layers of black clothing, had gathered in the Visitor Centre where it was warm with heaters and a variety of hot soups. The Standedge Visitor Centre is on the canal, by a man made tunnel - a canal tunnel that runs through the hills and is the largest and longest in the UK. The performance is held on a slope by the visitor centre. Along with the fire performance is a lot of fireworks and a battle between two giants – Jack Frost and the Green Man – and being Imbolc, you know the outcome – the Green Man always wins.

The school children who participate in an art workshop every year at school in regards to Imbolc commented this year that they were sick of the Green Man winning and were planning to ‘cheer on’ Jack Frost. And indeed they did – from our position after our fire twirling show, we could hear the crowd cheering on Jack, especially the little voices of the children. But the Green Man won in the end, of course, because Spring is on its way and the proof of that was the snowdrops and crocuses that were beginning to grow.

The event was over quicker than it started, and was a huge success – the people loved the snow, they all felt that Jack Frost won this time – it seems he did, after the blizzard finished, which was going on during the entire show, it was a crisp, icy winter wonderland, and the moon was almost
full upon the white landscape.

photos courtesy of Ali Smithie, Gary Stevenson and the Daily Mail

A magical year in Stonewylde

For those of you pagans who love reading, the books mentioned below will be your next favourite books.

The Stonewylde series, written by Kit Berry, are a wonderful new series of pagan books -

'Stonewylde is an alternative community, hidden away in the heart of Dorset and ruled by the charismatic Magus. It's a place of standing stones and earth energy – a place where the old ways are remembered. Within a great stone circle the eight pagan festivals are celebrated and ancient rites performed. The thirteen full moons are honoured and the people live natural and uncomplicated lives, as their ancestors have done for hundreds of years.'

Kit Berry's magical Stonewylde puts me in mind of Summerisle - from 'The Wicker Man,' and Cornwall Coombe from 'Harvest Home' - an idyllic community where earth magick is recognised, festivals are frequent, and a traditional way of bringing in the harvest is as old as the hills. Mystery, but also murder, is conducted in Stonewylde, as the battle between good and evil is fought to rescue Stonewylde from a power hungry patriarch.

There was a trilogy to start with - Magus of Stonewylde, Moondance of Stonewylde, and Solstice at Stonewylde - but such was the success of Kit's books, she was asked to write two more - as of August 2011, the fourth book Shadows at Stonewylde was released and eager pagans everywhere bought the book to find they could not put it down till it was finished.

http://www.stonewylde.com/

I widely recommend these books, for a gripping tale of pagan lifestyles within a place that every pagan has within their hearts - Stonewylde.

The Green Man

My Yorkshire-born mother collects the Dalesman magazine, an A5-sized magazine about the Yorkshire Dales - and she has been getting a subscription for many decades. Indeed, I have found many awesome gems in the mags regarding pagan history, myths, English folkloric festivals (maypole and hobby horses) and legends - all from rural Yorkshire. Its a great magazine, I've cited them in articles and blog posts, and enjoy flipping through them when I visit Mum and Dad.

Here is an article about the Green Man that appeared in the latest issue that arrived -

(for those who don't know, Wharram Percy is a deserted medieval village (the most famous one in England and an archaeologists dream) with only a church left, and remains of old allotments of land only visable from the air!)

The Green Man (article from August 2011 Dalesman)

It is a curiosity that the head and face of what many interpret to be an important pagan deity appears with such frequency in Christian churches – and not only throughout Britain, but in Europe and beyond. And in the UK, of course, the so called Green Man appears on many inn and pub signs. The Green Man sign currently handing outside the hostelry and hotel in the Market Square of Malton is a variant on the others because the chap depicted there is someone pretty closely related to the idea of the legendary Robin Hood, Squire of Loxley.

So who was the original Green Man? Well, he appears to have been some sort of spirit or fertility figure, symbolising re-birth. He is both full of vitality and virility. Vines and green leaves and other vegetation adorn his head, sprout from his eyes and ears, and wreath his temples. He sometimes pokes out his tongues, and he often has cat-like ears.

And, let us not forget, early Christians would often “convert” earlier gods to their own cause, and sometimes even made them into saints. Druids worshipped a man of the forests, and particularly the spirits of the oak trees. He goes back into the mists of time (oddly, he’s always a male, never female – despite connections to Mother Earth). One of the most important Roman finds in Britain, the Mildenhall Hoard, has a huge silver salver as one of its major pieces, and there, in the centre, is the raised face of a Green Man.

Jack in the Green (who figures largely in many May Day festivities), John Barleycorn, Puck and Robin Goodfellow all have elements of the Green Man about them, and even cheerful old Santa (as illustrated in early Victorian drawings) is a holly-wreathed bucolic gent with a zest for life.

Since Yorkshire is the largest county in England, it won’t come as any surprise to readers to find that we lead the rest in Green Men dotted about in our churches and monastic ruins. There are carvings of Green Men in Fountains Abbey, in Pickering, Pocklington and on the ruins of the church in the lost village of Wharram Percy.

You can spot them in stone in Ripon and Rudstone, and in Burton Agnes, Bridlington, Bishop Burton and Beverley Minster. Learned researchers have tracked down at least 120 Green Men in the east of the country and in Ryedale alone, and they turn up on pews, columns, chairs, fonts and pulpits. That’s something of a record. Sadly, a particularly fine lectern in the church at Burton Agnes, with no less than four Green Men carved into its ancient surface, was stolen – and hasn’t been seen since. So much for leaving churches unlocked and open for the curious to view with interest and reverence.

Pubs with the Green Man name are, oddly, far more rare. Apart from our chum in Malton, there’s another on Otley Road in Bradford and one (apparently now closed) in Hull, and there, unless readers know otherwise (which you frequently do), we are.

In Malton the Green Man is a late Georgian-looking building, typical of market towns of the day. It is white-washed, and has been altered slightly with fairly recent dormer windows. Malton Ladies’ Luncheon Club used to meet here until their numbers grew to be rather more than the dining room could hold, and now the ladies meet monthly in nearby Pickering.

The sign (at present) is a little tired and careworn, and needs a sympathetic refreshment. Let’s hope that is in the pipeline. And what, since you ask, is the pub at Doncaster’s very own Robin Hood Airport called. Could they have called it the Robin of Loxley, or the Green Man? Erm, no. With a singular lack of imagination, they’ve called it … The Amy Johnson. And what has the late lovely aviatrix got to do with Doncaster? In a word, nowt. But then, that’s the naming of pubs for you..