The Merry Month of May

This is the unedited version of an essay which appeared in abbreviated form in the excellent Folklore Tapes Calendar Customs II Box Set.

May Day is one of the turning points of the year, the moment when the transformations of the seasons’ cycles are ritually observed and celebrated. The Eve of May displays an obverse face to Halloween’s soot-blackened mask, fixed on the diametrically opposite arc of the slowly-spinning annular globe. Both have origins in the Celtic pastoral (or livestock farming) year and the solar festivals which lent it formal division. Samhain marked its end (and the end of the year as a whole) on the last day of October; Beltane its new May beginning. Samhain heralded the months of darkness, Beltane opened the door to summer. Fires were lit on both occasions, to invoke the sun and anticipate or celebrate its return. After Samhain, the fires would retreat inside, much diminished, to be tended in the hearth. Beltane saw them coming outdoors again, stoked into blazing conflagrations to reflect the solar rising. Samhain saw cattle being led into winter shelter. Beltane was the time for them to be led back out to pasture. On both occasions, they would be driven through twin bonfires. This fiery passage offered protection against the supernatural forces whose power surged at these interzonal periods, when corporeal and spirit worlds were in close proximity, like the Earth and Moon at perigee.

Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, from Arthur Rackham's illustrations for A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream dramatises this interpenetration of parallel worlds, blending fantasies of antiquity and British otherworld folklore with the formal dance of Tudor pageantry. At the same time, it allegorises the confusing intoxication of love and desire, the awakening of which is another key element of May Day revels. Whilst the title would seem to fix the date, there are various references to May Day which suggest that the play’s nocturnal entanglements take place on May Eve, and that May Day ritual, revel and romance is on everybody’s mind. Lysander speaks of ‘the wood, a league without the town – where I did meet once with Helena to do observance to a morn of May’. The enraged Hermia spits out ‘How am I, thou painted maypole? Speak! I am not so low but that my nails can reach unto thine eyes’. And Theseus speculates ‘no doubt they rose up early to observe the rite of May’. The interaction of human and faerie worlds, with the appearance of Shakespeare’s versions of Puck (also referred to as Robin Goodfellow and Hobgoblin) and the King and Queen of the fairies, Oberon and Titania, certainly points to May Eve as the more appropriate frame for the night’s dramas. This unanchored calendrical vagueness creates a moondappled superimposition of festive periods which blurs and transcends the rigidly linear grid of time; a grid which is dissolved and dispersed like drifting fog in the eternal lands of dream.

Arthur Rackham illustration for A Midsummer Night's Dream

Human beings also sought immunisation from devilry or the wicked caprices of the fairy folk by jumping through the sacred flames they had driven their cattle between. The pungent woodsmoke purged them of whatever pheremones attracted the attentions of hungry spirit world denizens. Sacrifices of cattle or sheep considered less prime stock would be offered as propitiation. The word Beltane comprises two separate elements forged into one festive name. Bel means shining or lucky, and tane fire. So, Beltane offered the talismanic blessing of fire and the promise of the sun’s renewed beneficence, the return of the light.

Superstitions surrounding May Eve, May Day and the ensuing days at the start of the month persisted well into the medieval period, and even into the post-Reformation era. Fairies might steal or sour milk, or witches spell maleficent harm on the herd. In Northern Europe, May Eve was Walpurgisnacht, the Eve of the sanctified Saxon abbess Walpurga. It was a night when witches were thought to swarm in the skies, flying across the fields and heading to the high places such as the Brocken peak in the Harz Mountains for their Sabbat communion with the Devil, and creating opportunistic mischief and malevolent damage in their wake. Something of the dread attending this night on the continent was translated into the British idiom. The belief The beginning of May was associated with bad luck, and it was considered an unwise act of generosity to pass on fire from the home hearth on May Eve or May Day. The fire was analogous to the kindly donor’s spirit, and could be used to gain mastery over it. Thus, anyone requesting a flame to spark their own fire on or around the first of May might find themselves accused of intent towards witchery. Better to remain shivering by the cold grate than arouse such suspicions. Hares caught in pasture fields on May Day, darting between the hooves of the cattle, would be hunted and killed. They might be witches in transmuted form (werehares?), milksnatchers or livestock blighters. Rowan or elder boughs would offer some protection against supernatural forces, and fairies could be charmed or at least distracted for a vital moment by tying colourful ribbons to hawthorn branches.

Walpurgisnacht flight from Danish director Benjamin Christensen's 1922 film Haxan:Witchcraft Through the Ages

Echoes of Beltane fire rituals can be detected in various May Day games and customs. The sun’s radiance is condensed in the spirit-raising glow of yellow primroses and marsh marigolds (‘the herb of Beltane’) woven into garlands to be hung about the village or town. In parts of Scotland, bannock cakes were cooked in May Day fires, buns with knob-knuckled crowns like a boulder-strewn moorland landscape. One of the cakes would be divided and a piece smudged with charcoal from the fire. The unfortunate who drew this tainted treat from basket or bonnet would be execrated as the ‘carline’ or scapegoat for the following year, spurned and made mock of. A distant memory of human sacrifice on the bone-fire? Probably not. There’s no evidence for such specific seasonal practices beyond Roman anti-Celtic propaganda. It could be a deeply uncomfortable social and psychological experience for the victim, nevertheless, a form of licensed bullying which united the rest of the community. At some point a presumably intoxicated individual noticed, as he bounded after it, how well his fumbled cake bounced down a hillside, and the tradition of bannock rolling was born; a pointless, vaguely idiotic pastime devoid of any symbolic, sacred or ritualistic import which was largely an excuse to pelt down a grassy slope. Like many pointless, vaguely idiotic pastimes it was, and still is hugely enjoyable.

May Day festivities are above all about getting out of doors and inhaling the first breath of summer; throwing the early morning windows wide and heading for the woodlands and meadows with a light skip in the step. The opening lines of many a folk song attest to this spirit: ‘O as I rose up one May morning/One May morning so early (Seventeen Come Sunday); ‘One morning in the month of May/As from my cot I strayed/Just at the dawning of the day’ (The Spotted Cow); ‘As I walked out one midsummer’s morning/To a-view the fields and to take the air’ (Banks of Sweet Primroses); When I was a-walking one morning in May/To hear the birds whistle and nightingales play (Green Bushes); ‘Now it was on a summer’s day in the merry month of May/I was strolling around my grandfather’s farm’ (The Ball of Yarn). Etc. etc.

These opening lines are usually followed by an encounter with a charming maid, or by the lament of a maid waylaid by a charming rogue – essentially two conflicting perspectives on the same subject, conquest and defeat. For May was a time when the sap was rising and the first steps of the summer courtship dances were tripped. The comic romantic complications of A Midsummer Night’s Dream make formal play with such lusty woodland assignations. May folk songs are full of bawdy, nudge nudge innuendos and euphemisms, designed to raise gusts of knowingly ribald if not outright filthy laughter down at the local village inn. Analogies are drawn between seasonal farming labours and the fulfilment of desire, connecting the natural cycles of the year with those of the human heart. So Cupid the Pretty Ploughboy is observed by an enamoured maid ‘ploughing his furrow deep and low/Breaking the clods to pieces, some barley for to sow’; the search for a ‘charming maid’s’ Spotted Cow provides an excuse for a day of sport and play ‘down in yonder bourne’, a pleasurable encounter with the promise of further hunts for the straying and in all-probability non-existant creature heralded by the coded cry ‘ye gentle swain I’ve lost my spotted cow’; The Ball of Yarn plays lascivious metaphorical variations on the farmboy’s desire to wind up a country maid’s ‘little ball of yarn’. The Sussex-dwelling Copper Family song Pleasant Month of May (collected in Bob Copper’s book A Song for Every Season) depicts the sweaty labour of haymaking before the arrival of a travelling piper at sundown and the commencement of festive merriment. The final verse conjures images of bucolic bliss and pastoral amours inseparable from the lay of the land and its tending:
‘We called for a dance and we tripp-ed it along,/We danced all round the haycocks till the rising of the sun./When the sun did shine such a glorious light and the harmless birds did sing,/Each lad took his lass in his hand and went back to his haymaking’.

Sometimes traditional May songs are simply evocations of the early summer ambience, with no double-meanings attached. Such is By the Green Grove, another Copper song, which is a simple and affecting paean to the heartswelling beauty of birdsong in the Sussex countryside. ‘No music, no songster can with them compare’. There are darker presentiments of harvests to come to be found in the memoirs of Bob Copper, too. In his reminiscences of May haymaking, he recalls that ‘the quiet of the field would by invaded by a gang of six or eight men arriving carrying their scythes across their shoulders’. The shadow of the reaper is present even in the merry morning of May, the time of renewal and rebirth. Et in Arcadia ego.

The license associated with May Day inevitably roused the ire of Protestant critics, constant complaint against the state of things inherent in their very name. The Puritan John Stubbes is highly amusing to read for the intense passages of fevered ranting his broiling indignation stews. With variable statistics plucked from the overheated undercroft of his brain, he rages in his 1583 screed The Anatomie of Abuses that ‘I have heard it credibly reported…by men of great gravity, credit, and reputation, that of forty, threescore, or a hundred maids, going to the wood overnight, there have scarcely the third part of them return home undefiled. These be the fruits which these cursed pastimes bring forth’. He would no doubt also have disapproved of the vanity of a later tradition, that of bathing the face in May morning dew to lend the complexion a magical glow for the rest of the month and banish troublesome freckles. Samuel Pepys records in his diary that his wife indulged in this hopeful custom, and he rather touchingly worries about her safety being abroad in the early hours.

Bringing in the May to the streets of Padstow

The custom most widely associated with May Day was the bringing in of the May. Boughs of blossoming hawthorn would be cut down and brought back from meadow’s edge and woodland and strewn or hung about town or village, some woven into garlands, others left as they were found. The spiritually refreshing experience of going out into the fields and communing with the natural world in the renewal of its blossoming and unfurling was an integral and profound part of this seasonal ritual. Hawthorn was generally favoured, but there were regional variations. The Cornish tended towards sycamore, whilst the Welsh often opted for birch. Whatever the arboreal species, however, it was given the designation ‘May’. The Elizabethan tailor turned writer John Stow describes the bringing in of the May with beautiful simplicity and clarity in his 1598 book Survey of London: ‘On May Day in the morning, every man, except impediment, would walk into the greenwoods, there to rejoice their spirit with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers, and with the harmony of the birds’. Bringing in the May, or going-a-maying, was a way of connecting the settled, built environment or human habitation with the cyclical patterns of growth beyond its bounds. Wild nature in all its bounteous flowering was brought into the heart of the ordered domain of civilisation where it had been tamed or banished altogether. Something of the spirit felt by those who had gone out into the fields on a May morning was thereby given emblematic form. Some kind of symbolic exchange was effected. Man ventured out into Nature, and Nature entered into the habitations of Man.

The Padstow maypole

Maypoles were also erected in villages, towns and cities. Young trees were cut down from neighbouring woodlands (not always with the permission of the landowner) and hauled by teams of men and oxen into the appointed green or square where they were heaved up and made fast. The towering wooden columns would be painted with colourful stripes or other patterns and hung about with ribbons, boughs and garlands. It became the focal point for local festivities, for dancing, whether in a wheeling, handlocked circle or in more abandoned, weaving approaches and evasions. A maypole could remain in place for many years until it began to rot away at its base and require replacement. Sometimes it would crash to the ground before such removals were effected. There were maypoles of great longevity and renown in London. In the early 17th century, an immense one stood for a good few years at Cornhill in front of the church of St Andrew, whose spire it exceeded in height. The church became known as St Andrew Undershaft as a result. Another stood in The Strand in Elizabethan times before being felled in 1644, the victim of a Puritan ban on maypoles instigated in that year. A giant 134 foot pole was resurrected on the same spot in 1661, the Royal Crest at its tip marking it as a prominent celebratory symbol of the Restoration. It stood on the site of St Mary le-Bow into the early years of the 18th century. A substitute pole, taken down in 1718, was purchased by Sir Isaac Newton. He used it to prop up the great 123 foot telescope which had been installed in Wanstead Park in Essex the previous year. A perfect amalgam of folkloric traditions, possibly reaching back into the ancient past, and the new science, with its distant optic gaze focussed on the future. Nigel Kneale would have made something out of such a richly symbolic conjunction. It reminds me of his placement of a radio telescope besides a stone circle in his 1979 Quatermass series.

Jo and the Doctor join in the Maypole revels at the end of the 1971 Doctor Who serial The Daemons. Yates and the Brigadier retire for a pint

The reliably rancorous Philip Stubbes looked upon such practises with seething horror, of course, voiced in his unceasingly virulent strain of invective. ‘They go some into the woods and groves, some to another, where they spend all night in pleasant pastimes, and in the morning they return bringing with them birch boughs, and branches of trees, to deck their assemblies withal. And no marvel, for there is a great Lord present amongst them, as superintendant and lord over their pastimes and sports: namely, Satan Prince of Hell. But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is the may-pole, which they bring home with great veneration…twenty, or forty yoke of oxen…draw home this may-pole (this stinking idol rather)’. Stubbes describes how, once the villagers or townspeople have reared up and decorated the pole, ‘then fall they to banquet and feast, to leap and dance about it, as the heathen people did, at the dedication of their idols, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself’. Escalating his hyperbolic disgust to a climactic pitch, he damns the May merrymakers utterly: ‘Assuredly, I think neither Jews nor Turks, Saracens, nor Pagans, nor any other people how wicked, or barbarous soever, have ever used such devilish exercises as these: nay, they would have been ashamed once to have named them, much less to have used them’.

The May Day revels of late medieval and Tudor England which Stubbes so vocally despised incorporated all manner of May games. Morris dancing (‘the devil’s dance withal’ – Stubbes) featured frequently during its 16th century craze and for a period thereafter, and there might be pipers and harpers, drummers and fools to fuel the festivities with music, capers and general jollity. Mummers plays were sometimes staged, the performers disguised, which gave them a certain license to mock the high and mighty. Parades were peopled by stock figures of British folklore, religious devotion and popular legend: George and the Dragon, regional saints, Jack-in-the-Greens, Giants, Devils and St Michael, also with dragon in tow (the Devil in final Revelation battle form, ready for the slaying). Robin Hood and his greenwood band of righteous outsiders were particularly popular, and would often go around from door to door raising money (not necessarily for the Parish poor, either). Plays relating the familiar tales of daring feats and defiant gestures became widespread in the later medieval period. The first recorded example took place in Exeter in 1427, but they became and integral part of Tudor May Day celebrations in the years leading up to the cultural and historical earthquake of the Reformation. Maid Marian was a relatively late addition to the canon, appearing in the 15th century, possibly imported from French Romances and ballads such as Adam de la Halle’s late 13th century musical play Jeu de Robin et Marion (recorded in the 1970s by David Munrow and his Early Music Consort). Robin has been interpreted at various times as a spirit of the greenwood, a green or wild man figure symbolic of vegetal death and resurrection, a seasonal king whose sacrifice would ensure the return of the sun and the fertility of the crops (a favoured theme of JG Frazier put forward in The Golden Bough, his capacious survey of comparitive myth and religion), the high priest of a coven or a historically-based, rebellious anti-hero fighting the power. Marian and Robin are also sometimes seen as the Queen and King of May; Marian the embodiment of Spring, a Persephone or Flora figure, Robin her knightly green consort. Like all figures who slip out of the mundane world and into the mutable realm of myth he was, in other words, all things to all men.

Robin and Marian’s assumption of the roles of King and Queen are indicative of a more general play with inversion and transformation within the context of May Games. In a variation of the Christmas tradition of electing Lords of Misrule, mock-kings or lords were often crowned or ennobled for the day and presided over the celebrations. In the Scottish districts of Borthwick, Haddington, Peebles and Linlithgow an Abbot of Unreason was ordinated to give his anti-clerical blessing to the wild indulgences of the day. There was a strong element of mischief making, and echo of the licensed knavery of Hallow’s Eve, and of the Puckish trickery of fairy world denizens so active at these intersticial times. Guisers, cocky chancers (latterly geezers) in disguise, prowled the streets planning and enacting pranks on the suspecting victim who, on this day, was powerless to seek recourse. The 19th century Lancastrian radical Samuel Bamford recalls the occurrence of ‘mischeif-neet’ on May 1st in Early Days, his 1849 memoir of his early life in Middleton, Manchester and Salford. Tokens from the fields would be left by young men on the doorsteps of neighbours (mainly female) as symbolic assessments of character, whether cruel and spiteful or complimentary and amorous: ‘a gorse bush indicated a woman notoriously immodest; and a holly bush, one loved in secret; a tup’s horn intimated that man or woman was faithless to marriage; a branch of sapling, truth in love; and a sprig of birch, a pretty girl’. A similarly laddish blend of horniness and spite was enacted across the country in the Cambridge fenlands. Here, sloe blossom was for the favoured and blackthorn for those considered loose, elder for those judged insufficiently well turned out and nettles for those the boys thought had a sharp tongue (no doubt directed at their clumsy advances).

Masks and costumes provided the opportunity for the wearer to get away with all manner of mischief, taking on new identities which allowed for a distancing from the everyday social self. Transvestism was rife, men seizing the chance to put on dresses and wigs and paint their bearded faces. There were Morris ‘Mollies’, and May Marians in Robin Hood plays generally embodied by men in drag presenting their exaggerated, grotesque versions of femininity. Taking hybrid human and animal form was also prevalent on this day of transformations. Stag, bull or ram horns or heads might be borne. But such cross-species mummery and guising was most widely manifested in the migration of the hobby horse across the country. It was a costume which came in a variety of shapes and sizes, from draped frames which entirely enveloped the human occupant to ‘Hooden Horses’ from which the upper torso of the ‘rider’ emerged, to poles with clacking heads (and in some cases stripped and garlanded horse skulls) affixed to their upheld tips.

The most renowned hobby horse (or Obby Oss as it is idiomatically known) is undoubtedly the one which is led out of its paddock in the back of the Golden Lion inn and onto the streets of Padstow every year. It comprises a large hoop tightly covered with shiny black oilkskin which drapes around in a loose circling skirt. The disc is like a black anti-sun, glistening with photo-negative inversion; or an occult moon, a remnant of the dark days goaded through the summer-garlanded streets one more time before being shut away for the year. Stylised features on the flat plane of its broad face (intriguingly reminiscent of the designs found on traditional African ceremonial masks) heighten its disconcertingly alien quality. It is more like the product of a sleek biomechanical future than a horse, a 1970s Dr Who monster in swaying, revolving motion. It is guided, led and driven by ‘Teasers’ who try to keep its attention by drawing it into a ducking and swirling dance. The unpredictability of its movements might find it suddenly swivelling to turn its blank-eyed disc-visage on nervous onlooker, however, throwing back a distorted shadow reflection, seen as through a glass darkly. Its inky depths are akin to the Elizabethan alchemist and occult philosopher Dr Dee’s obsidian shewstone, the spirit mirror whose polished black surface he tried to see through to communicate with angels (or demons?) in another dimension. Who knows what one might see if one gazes too long into the depthless yet potentially bottomless void of the Oss’s ‘face’, especially with the intoxicating effect of the freely-flowing ale and the pounding beats and hypnotically repeated refrains of the Padstow Obby Oss song deranging the senses. But it passes swiftly on before anyone can get truly lost. The black, flashing form glints against the blue (with any luck) of the sky and the white and red of the Padstonians’ costumes.

The ceremony and its preparations were captured by folklorist and recorder Alan Lomax and cameraman George Pickow in their 1953 film Oss Oss Wee Oss (the cajoling cry of the onlooking townsfolk), included on the BFI collection of folkloric footage Here’s a Health to the Barley Mow. They preface their dramatised document with the assertion that ‘this strange dance is a modern remnant of an ancient springtime rite in which primitive man rejoiced in the renewed fertility of the land’, adopting the romantic fancies of the mid-century which actively sought to unearth ancient Pagan roots in any and all seasonal observances. Traditions are open to, and indeed require re-interpretation, remodelling and above all reinvigoration, otherwise they eventually ossify (if you’ll pardon the pun in this instance) and crumble into dust, to be blown away by the forgetful winds of the progressing years. So let’s join Lomax and Pickow in this fulfilling fancy, so long as we don’t mistake supposition for historical fact – no matter how intuitively ‘right’ it feels.

Helston May Morris dancers

You’ll also come across The Flora Faddy Furry Dance Day in the BFI collection, Richard Philpott’s impressionistic record of another famous Cornish May Day festival, the Helston Furry Dance. Furry here could be a corruption of the Cornish feur, meaning holy day. The Floral Dance could be in honour of Flora, the Roman Goddess of flowers, or her local equivalent. The town is certainly resplendently decked out with green boughs and flowered garlands, and the Helston Town Band heroically plays the Floral Dance throughout the day as an accompaniment to a rather sedate series of parading, genteely pirhouetting dances which wend their way through the narrow nexus of the town centre’s winding streets. Philpott’s 1989 film (which feels more like it was made in the 70s) uses cross-editing, montage and intercut woodcuts and silhouettes of labyrinths, dragons and maypoles in an attempt to convey a sense of continuity with older traditions, sacred processions and universal archetypes. Like Lomax and Pickow, he claims the Furry Dance for ‘an ancient pre-Christian spring ritual’. Or perhaps he is simply trying to exorcise the twinkling spectre of Terry Wogan and his dispiritingly popular 1978 version.

George Cruickshank's cartoon of a London May Day parade

The Milkmaid's Parade

EP Thompson, in his classic 1963 history The Making of the English Working Class, notes that the rapidly expanding urbanisation brought about by the industrial revolution did not mean the dying out of old seasonal rituals and customs. Just as new towns grew over old rural settlements and villages were absorbed by the spreading boundaries of cities to become suburbs, so there was a continuity of celebratory tradition. May rituals brought the rhythms of the now-distanced natural world into the smog-darkened centres of the industrialised cities. In London, urban milkmaids who delivered supplies of the whitestuff danced through the streets, initially with a milk pail balanced on their head like an inverted metal bonnet. This basic set-up was steadily elaborated over the seasons, an element of competition undoubtedly coming into play. In the end, piled helmets of polished silver were precariously balanced on platters garlanded with flowers, the whole ensemble thrillingly threatening to tumble to the pavement in a clattering disaster if perfect deportment was not maintained. It was a celebration of the first significant milk yield, and a reminder that even in the crawling heart of the metropolis, from which nature was increasingly smoke-blotted and walled out, people were still reliant on the turning seasons and the bounty they produced. To such an end, garlands were thrown into the Thames to acknowledge the watery conduit along which this bounty was carried into the city.

As if to mock the new-found ostentation of the milkmaids, ‘bunters’ dressed in rags would follow in their wake, parodying a now-established tradition. These women were of a lesser social standing, rag pickers or, as some whispered, ladies of ill repute. Class distinctions and their attendant snobberies infected even these celebratory occasions, noticeably more so once they had migrated to the city. What would once have been inter-village rivalries were now concentrated into more condensed and divisive centres of population. Sweeps also joined in the parades, whose money-raising opportunities were invaluable to them at this time. Whilst everyone else was greeting the lengthening days and warming sun with joy in their hearts, the sweeps were fretting at the upcoming loss of trade as hearth fires were gradually extinguished. Their presence became more and more prominent, and they introduced the startling figure of the Jack-in-the-Green to proceedings. Again, this was a prideful and competitive elaboration of initially simple leaf and blossom garlanded bonnets. As if the Jacks were undergoing a gradual vegetal growth, they got annually more expansive. Eventually, the sweep disappeared beneath a huge conical frame covered in greenery and flowers, and giant Jack was seen to walk with a swaying gait through the streets of London, guided by his ‘bogies’. These attendants were often the children whose chimney crawling labours were ended by progressive legislation in the late 19th century.

May Day traditions have always been subject to appropriations, revivals and revisionism. Many of the customs we associate with it are largely Victorian fabrications, attempts to escape from the pressures and inequities of industry and empire into a Merrie England fantasy of a simple, gilded past when everyone knew their place and all was pageantry, chivalry and happily purposeful agricultural labour. The term merry England was popularised in the early nineteenth century by the essayist William Hazlitt (who referred to its ‘rustic gambols’) and in particular by Walter Scott, whose 1808 poem Marmion referred to a time when ‘England was merry England’. Scott’s immense popularity in the 19th century did much to fuel the Victorian passion for medieval revivalism. Victorian worthies refashioned the old May Day rites, flensing them of their carnality and wild, celebratory communal spirit and reducing them to children’s games and carefully staged worker’s pastimes. They bequeathed us the much-diminished maypole with its trailing, coloured ribbons grasped by glumly skipping boys and girls, and the election of young May Queens for the year, condemned to sit shivering on floats for an interminable duration. Their resurrection of Morris Dancing, which had long since fallen out of fashion, was a singularly pallid ghost of its formerly rambunctious self. Even our old friend Philip Stubbes would have found it hard to work up a head of indignation over their polite village fete prancing.

The manufacturing and manipulation of a dream of England’s glory was not new, however. Both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I had participated in May Games which evoked visions of a medieval golden age. Elizabeth attended formal May celebrations at Greenwich Palace in 1558, the first year of her reign, and witnessed a pageant whose no doubt trembling and fearful cast included Morris Dancers, St George and the Dragon, a giant, drummers, the ‘nine worthies of Christendom’, Robin Hood, Little John, Maid Marian and Friar Tuck. John Stow, in his A Survey of London, is one of several writers who record Henry VIII’s May Daying outing (on this occasion setting out from Greenwich Palace) with Catherine of Aragon to the woods on Shooters Hill. Here they picnicked beneath the trees and were entertained by their host, Robyn Hood, with displays of archery. Both monarchs made conscious use of the popular May Day customs, associating themselves with the golden age neverland such pageantry summoned up. In a sense they became magical king and queen of May, roles as chimerical as the mock monarchs they displaced with self-mythologised projections of the authentic article. Alan Moore recognises this Tudor version of Merrie England dreaming as a Disney construct in The Unearthing, his psychogeographical Shooters Hill reverie of history, myth and place and their interaction with an individual human consciousness, spiralling outward from an intimate portrait of his friend Steve Moore, the late comic strip writer. He writes ‘out a-maying with one of his Catherines, Henry VIII attends a Robin Hood fair, Shooters Hill as Medieval theme park, and meets players dressed as Robin, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet, Bashful, Goofy’.

Thankful Sturdee's 1906 photograph of Fowler's Deptford Troop with attendant Jack-in-the-Green

Traditions have been re-invented for the modern age too, with the resurgence of a composite Paganism patched together in the latter half of the twentieth century playing a vital role. The London Jack-in-the-Green walks again, bringing a shimmying rustle of spring greenery and floral colourflash to the grey steel and glass canyons of the city. Its rebirth came about through the discovery of a 1906 photo of the old Jack by Thankful Sturdee (a strong and blessed name if ever there was one), its faded black and white image brought to vibrantly technicolored life. The milkmaids balance their silverware again, and the sweeps have returned to Rochester with a 7 foot Jack in tow. Beltane is now marked in the city, too, with a Pagan Pride parade making its way through Bloomsbury, an aptly named district to beat the bounds of. The spirit of Virginia Woolf looks down on them with amused benediction, I’m sure. Her final novel, Between the Acts, is all about the staging of a village pageant of British history and culture, and the continuity, renewal and convergence between the universal and the individual which it represents. Woolf’s story is partly about how there is no real distinction between the pageant and the incidental activities and incidents which take place around it – between the acts or during them. It’s all part of the great human parade. Issues of ‘authenticity’ or authorship seem beside the point in the light of this great communal connection, the sense of history’s vast acreage encompassed within an afternoon, or a flickering instant of flashing consciousness. The Pagan parade, with its inventive costumes and joyful sense of celebration, partakes of this spirit.

May Day rituals have repeatedly been the object of suppression and political appropriation over the centuries. A 1555 Act in Scotland banned the appointment of mock bishops and the participation in May Games. A political act which perhaps betokened a fear of mocking satire undermining authority. May Games were also banned in Kent in the wake of the 1554 rebellion led by Sir Thomas Wyatt, whose ragtag Kentish troops had reached as far as Southwark. The Puritans banned maypoles and the revels which took place around them, and their erection became an act of anti-Parliamentarian defiance. The restored Stuart monarchy lost no time in allying themselves to a renewal of the May Games, as we have seen from the royal crowning of the Strand maypole. May revels were even shifted to the end of the month to mark Charles II’s birthday on the 29th May, which was conveniently also the day on which he rode into London in 1660, restoring monarchical rule to the land. Oak boughs replaced May blossom as the dominant symbol of the day, memorialising the instantly storied occasion on which the king had hidden in an oak tree to evade Parliamentarian troops. It was a calculated act of propagandistic self-mythologisation, an equation of the king with the national tree, and with the renewal and rebirth of the spirit of the greenwood (although if JG Frazer’s theories are to be given credence, this could of course be an unfortunate analogy). Royal Oak Day became an officially decreed holiday for a while, although observance of it rapidly tailed off as the Stuart monarchs squandered the public’s affections. There are echoes of it still in Oak Apple Day in Wiltshire and Garland Day in Castleton, and indeed in the Bank Holiday which comes towards the end of May.

May Blossom and Oak Leaf - Opposing symbols at the poles of the month

This is at the other end of the month from May Day Bank Holiday, and if the link with Charles II and the restored monarchy is granted, at the opposite end of the political spectrum. With elections of mock monarchs, bishops of unreason and the welcoming of Robin Hood to preside over the festivities, May Day always had a strongly anti-authoritarian side. This was why the authorities felt the need periodically to exert their control over it. In 1890, the International Socialist movement (the Second International) chose May Day as the occasion for an international strike in support of the struggle in America to establish an 8 hour working day. It was subsequently formally declared as International Workers Day, an annual celebration of solidarity and united purpose. The romantic Merrie England associations of English utopian socialists in the William Morris, Arts and Crafts mould can be seen in Walter Crane’s poster The Worker’s May-Pole, his ‘offering for May-Day 1894’. The may-pole is given female embodiment, arms held out like spreading branches, a circling garland of flowers below. She loosely bears a ribbon in the open palms of her hands as if it had been draped across her statuesque form by one of the surrounding celebrants. On it is blazoned the ideological trinity Socialization, Solidarity, Humanity. The ribbons extending from the may-pole Goddess’ dress are grasped by happy and healthy Arts and Crafts peasants who dance around this figure of bounty and utopian promise. The ribbons are also imprinted with slogans and ideals such as ‘Eight Hours’, ‘Leisure for All’, ‘Abolition of Privilege’, ‘The Land for the People’, and ‘No Starving Children in the Board Schools’ (echoes of Dickens’ Dotheboys Hall). Further banners held aloft in the background read ‘The Hope of Labour is the Welfare of the World’ and ‘Neither Riches nor Poverty’. The next year, Crane produced A Garland for May Day 1895, held up by a bare-footed Arts and Crafts Goddess, and would about with further slogans, including one which reads ‘The Land for the People – Merrie England’.

Walter Crane's Workers' Maypole

This politicisation of May Day has proved a recurrent irritant over the years. During the Cold War, the International Workers Day descended into a grim opportunity for the Soviet Union and its cowed Eastern Bloc dominions to roll out their latest armaments for a rumbling, earthshaking parade, missiles and tank snouts cocked at the sky like half-erected maypoles. Robin Hood and his merry greenwood band were replaced by Khruschev and his Red iron generals. In Britain, the Conservatives are always grumbling about May Day, latterday Stubbeses whose focus has shifted from moral indignation to the raising of the shibboleths of a quiescent socialism which still rankles with them even as it fades into a historical memory. Proposals to impose a Margaret Thatcher Day on the late August Bank Holiday proved as divisive as the Royal Oak Day celebrating the Restoration soon became.

May Day is ours, even as seasonal patterns and political power bases shift around us. It is to be decorated with boughs and garlands not flags of allegiance; an anticipation of haymaking not a commemoration of Thatcher; a day for dancing around the maypole, nor for marching in ranks behind sky-pointing missiles; rejoicing in the restoration of the sun, not of the monarchy. So let us all come together in merrie communion, feast, drink and dance, and sing the old Padstow song once more:
Unite and unite and let us all unite,
For summer is a-come unto day
And whither we are going we will all unite,
In the merry morning of May.

Bibliography:

Clifford, Sue & King, Angela (eds.) England in Particular
Steve Roud – The English Year; A Month-by-Month Guide to The Nation’s Customs and Festivals from May Day to Mischief Night
Nick Groom – The Seasons
Sara Hannant – Mummers, Maypoles and Milkmaids: A Journey Through the English Ritual Year
Roland Hutton - Pagan Britain
Roland Hutton – The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain
Roland Hutton – The Rise and Fall of Merrie England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700
Asa Briggs – A Social History of England
E.P.Thompson – The Making of the English Working Classes
Rodney Castleden – The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts
Iain Sinclair (ed.) – London: City of Disappearances (inc.Alan Moore – Unearthing)
Steve Roud & Julia Bishop (eds) – The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs
Alexandra Harris – Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (14th Edition)
Bob Copper – A Song for Every Season
William Shakespeare – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
BFI DVD – Here’s A Health to the Barley Mow

Chris Watson at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum

Sound recordist and musician Chris Watson was in conversation at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum with RSPB communications officer for the South West Tony Whitehead last night. Perhaps the differentiation between the two endeavours is a false one, however. In response to a question about the influence of his natural sound recordings on his music, Watson replied that he made no distinction between them. He has spoken before about the microphone being his instrument, and a highly versatile and adaptable one at that. Musicians and composers have long attempted to mimic or summon up the sounds of nature, from the shrill marsh bird cries of Japanese shakuhachi players through Beethoven’s programmatic traversal of the countryside in the Pastoral Symphony to Messiaen’s transliteration of avian song .Perhaps electronic musicians have come closest to evoking the complex and profoundly inhuman soundworld of melodic birdsong clusters, the seethe and chitter of insects and the compression and echoing boom of subaquatic depths. Watson mentioned his own indebtedness to Pierre Schaeffer and his musique concrete descendants. He fondly recalled his own early childhood recordings with a portable reel to reel tape machine given as a present by prescient parents. He fixed a microphone to the seed-strewn bird table in the garden, set the reels in motion and retreated inside to see what hungry visitors he might sonically capture with his new magnetic magic box. It was one of those moments, epiphanic in recollection, when a lifetime of vocational creativity is seeded. Bird seeded in this instance.

Watson, a son of the People’s Republic of Sheffield now resident in Newcastle, spent a decade of discovery and experiment in Cabaret Voltaire with Stephen Mallinder and Richard Kirk from 1971-1981, pre- to post-punk, only recording in the latter years of that fertile period. Working in his attic, a space which was half artist’s garrett, half mad scientist’s lab, the trio played freely with sound, seldom producing anything resembling conventional pop or rock. If they did, it was by accident and would be swiftly discarded. Watson built his own equipment, exhibiting an inventiveness and ingenuity, as well as a readiness to make lateral use of the materials to hand, which would stand him in good stead for the challenges of his future career. He laboured over cut-ups and tape loops, guided his oscillator through undulating frequencies and transformed his organ playing through heavy processing until it sounded less like its instrumental self, more like a generator of sound swarms. He was delighted with the development of synthesisers, and the way that ‘non-musicians’ like Brian Eno used them, and bought an EMS AKS in the latter half of the 70s. It was this which he used on the debut Cabaret Voltaire LP Mix-UP, released in 1979. Watson left the group in 1981, shortly after a visit to the Top of the Pops studios to witness another band performing. Horrified at a vision of what might be, he left to pursue other interests. He did briefly continue his tape and concrete explorations with The Hafler Trio, however, a proliferating project initiated and masterminded by Andrew M.McKenzie and only occasionally and incidentally attaining the status of an actual trio.

Watson joined Tyne Tees Television as a sound recordist and then returned to that epiphanic childhood moment and worked for the RSPB, recording the sounds of birds and their environments. As he pointed out in his discussion with Tony Whitehead, the production of RSPB films was an invaluable apprenticeship for him and many others who went on to make wildlife films for the BBC. Watson himself is now a highly esteemed wildlife recordist, and has worked on innumerable programmes, including the all-important Attenbouroughs. He mentioned what a privilege it was to work with Sir David, describing him as ‘the perfect travelling companion’. These programmes have given him the opportunity to immerse himself in a hugely diverse range of environments and build up a cumulative sound picture which effectively encompasses much of the globe.

The detail and texture of sound are very important to him, as is the way in which it is heard. He is mildly disdainful of the compression and diminution of sound transmitted through TV speakers or stereo headphones. He prefers installations in which surround sound set-ups can come nearer to approximating natural sound as it is perceived in situ. The upstairs gallery to the rear of the museum allowed for a wide speaker spectrum, with a bass cone in the middle emitting low frequency rumble. This was ideal for the subsonic sounds of elephants, a harrumph whose vibrations affected the diaphragm as much as the eardrum. Watson pointed out that the fundamental, the root note, was below the range of human perception, so what we were hearing were the harmonics arrayed above it. Close-up recordings of a cheetah purr were similarly deep and resonant, solid waves of physically palpable sound which weren’t so far off from Sunn ((o)) drone power chords. Watson spoke of the musicality of this sound, and of others. There is something very Cageian about his refusal to demarcate between music and the sounds of the natural world. Close listening reveals the musicality inherent in a whole spectrum of living sounds. He also emphasised the intelligence of various animals, exhibiting a respect for life and a scepticism about the primacy of humanity and its assumed position at the head of the great chain of being. Orcas and Vultures seemed to particularly draw his admiration.

We were treated to a dizzying panoply of natural sounds, from the tiniest shrimps to the mightiest whales. The blue whale recording was not his own, he confessed. It remains his holy grail, a more benign Ahab quest to capture an awe-inspiring call capable of sounding out hundreds of miles of subaquatic space. The whale call truly tested the capacity of the speakers, its submarine frequencies a bone-shuddering groan until pitch-shifted upwards into a more audible range. It still made the chants of Tibetan monks sound like soprano squeaks, though. Watson argues, naturally enough, for the sound picture of a natural environment being as important as the visual aspect. It can be more stimulating to the imagination, and create more of a sense of being vitally present. Sound recording can almost be akin to magic in the way that it transports us to worlds which would otherwise be wholly inaccessible to our senses. We shrink to earwig on insect kingdoms and grow invisible to listen to animals which would shy from the merest hint of human presence. One of Watson’s most remarkable recordings was made by attaching contact mics. to the inside of a zebra’s rib-cage, killed the previous night and already lion-chewed and stripped of its prime cuts. Watson had rehearsed such a set-up on a post-Christmas turkey carcass, rejected by his seasonally satiated family. He recorded the metallic skraw of starlings which soon descended to devour the flesh and pick the bird’s bones clean. The vultures had spotted the zebra’s corpse from way up high and surrounded it, checking out the locale. Watson observed them and noted that they were highly aware that there was something unusual about this piece of carrion, even though he had done his best to conceal his wires and mics. Again, he emphasised the wily intelligence of these wary creatures. It took them some five hours before they eventually set to, beginning their thorough clean-up operation. By this time the unfortunate zebra was engulfed in a dark nebula of flies. The recording floats on the swarming drone of their incessant zzzzzzhhhhhh. Watson suggested that vultures were exactly as you’d expect them to sound – like scimitar slashes of guitar feedback. He was right. It was a remarkable sound, intoxicating yet slightly nauseating at the same time. You could almost sense the overpowering stench of death in your nostrils, an understandable synaesthetic response. Watson took this recording on one of his school visits once, using it to begin his presentation. ‘This is the last sound you would hear before you died, if you were a zebra’, he told the assembly of rapt children. He wasn’t invited back, he ruefully noted. But the kids loved it.

Chris Watson and Tony Whitehead on the Exe Estuary

Other sounds were called for by Tony Whitehead and members of the audience, Watson suggesting that it was becoming like a request show. The brief grunt of a cod even received an encore. It sounded like the swinging doors in Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. There was a haddock chorus from a fjord near Bergen, the ambient hum of midshipman fish, the sonic attack of a pistol shrimp, made with its oversized claw, and the grate and scrape of grazing limpets, recorded at high tide in Batten Bay, Plymouth. The tuned percussion of a capercaillie recorded in Scotland apparently attracted the attentions of Bjork, who was so entranced by its inherent musical qualities that she got in touch with Watson and asked if she could use it in a piece of her own. She has since attended one of Watson’s sound recording workshops in Iceland. He joked that she was a useful contact given her facility with a four wheel drive in the remoter wilds of her native country.

Watson and Whitehead both have an abiding concern with the issue of noise pollution in the modern world and the psychological impact this has on people’s lives. Watson noted that the recordings of starlings he had made 30 years ago, in which they imitated the sounds they heard around them, would be wholly different today. It was a sound picture which acted as a memorial to a world whose sonic character has changed rapidly over the intervening period. He mentioned the activism of Gordon Hempton in America, an ‘acoustic ecologist’ who is attempting to create a notional sanctuary comprising one square inch of silence in Olympic National Park, Washington State. Watson played his recordings of Orcas in the waters beneath the North Polar ice, emphasising the extent to which they lived in a world of sound; practically in terms of their echo location clicks and socially in terms of their keening calls and cries. He then played a recording in which the combine grind of the approaching icebreaking ship Odin could be heard loudly approaching from some 100 miles in the distance distance. Such noise pollution must have a devastating effect on such aurally sensitive creatures, he pointed out. It has been suggested that loud sonar beacons placed in the oceans to guide submarines have resulted in the mass beachings of dolphins and whales, driven out of their usual territories by this invasive noise. Watson talked of the almost transcendental experience of standing outside Scott’s hut in the Antarctic and reflecting upon the fact that in this quietest of spots he was experiencing a soundworld unchanged since the ill-fated expedition some century before. It was an experience unthinkable in most other regions of the world.

Watson is concerned with the loss of the ability to really listen. He is disdainful of the blanket use of music in wildlife documentaries. Sound recordings would be much more involving for the viewer, who would then also become a more active listener. I wholeheartedly agree on this point. The use of sweeping string themes, combined with swooping helicopter or crane shots, amounts to a bullying emotional manipulation, akin to being grasped by the lapels, shaken up a bit and yelled at to ‘feel some awe and shed a tear at the spectacle of it all, goddamn you’. Music, humorous or sentimental, also encourages a relentless anthropomorphism which detracts from a true appreciation of the otherness of non-human species. His own observance of quietude included conducting the interview in his socks. As he explained in an interview in The Wire some years back, in which an interviewer made the same observation, he doesn’t ‘like clomping around’. Whitehead shares his interest in quietude. Quietness not as an absence of sound, as both were quick to point out. That would be a highly, well, disquieting experience, an indicator of the absence of life. But quietness in the sense of an environment in which the true spatial depth and density of sound can be appreciated, the individual elements differentiated and their variation over time appreciated. Whitehead has invited sound artists from around the world to send their recordings of quiet environments to him, and he has released some of them on his Very Quiet Records label. They range from the island of Jogashima in Japan to Jean-Baptiste Masson’s recordings of the South African bush at midnight, Kalmara Xinsekt’s night sounds in the Amazonian rainforests to Joe Stevens’ birping of spawning Dorset frogs. Together, they form an invaluable soundpicture of the quietude still to be found in the world.

Chris Watson was a hugely personable speaker, conveying his enthusiasm for sound with quiet authority. His memories and sound-illustrated anecdotes were ably facilitated by the informal and also highly informed Tony Whitehead. A marvellous evening, in the true sense of the word. Chris was here in conjunction with the sound installation currently running in the museum’s back entrance area. The sound picture here shifts from the coastal ebb and flow of the tide through the kelp beds of Maer Rocks, Exmouth, the song of cirl buntings, skylarks and greenfinches in the RSPB managed farmland atop Labrador Bay near Shaldon, Dartford warblers and tree pipits on the Aylesbeare pebblebeds and finally to the oak woodlands of Yarner Wood, dense with the calls of song thrushes, cuckoos, willow warblers, wrens, tawny owls and carrion crows. It’s a fine piece, a sonic journey which takes us seamlessly through four different environments. A little sound bleeding from the geology section below introduces a bit of ambient drone from time to time, but it’s not overly intrusive. Some might argue that it actually adds a further dimension to the experience, although I suspect Watson wouldn’t be amongst them. Natural sound is rich with its own musicality, he would point out, and needs no distracting attempts at enhancement. The sound picture will change with the seasons, offering us pictures for ears from 7 more sites, presumably including those deadly pistol shrimps from Plymouth. CRACK. So go along to the museum, stand by the balcony at the top of the stairs, close your eyes and conjure up your own pictures in sound. In this light filled interior atrium, you will soon be lost in your own interior world.

The Ashton Ascension

PART ONE

The early days of March signal the first tenative stirrings of Spring, a turning time of the year when the bite of winter lingers but begins to cede its supremacy. It was a propitious moment to set off on a quest, a pilgrimage of sorts to discover the mysterious magic of pre-Reformation medieval and Tudor worlds as preserved in three local country churches. We would also be confronted with the jarring juxtaposition of the sacred and the secular, of heavenly and earthly power competing for attention. We would excavate stratified layers of history, occasionally catching a fading echo of some ancient archetypal myth figure, a fleeting peripheral flicker from the imagination of our pre-Christian forbears, still resonating in the carved stone arcades fashioned by medieval church masons. We would struggle up mighty slopes, bow our heads before driving hail and return through owl-haunted darkness. But with hope in our hearts and the shining white tower of the Haldon Belvedere to guide us, we would never give up.

First we needed fuel, however, and made our rendezvous in the warm and welcoming confines of Café 36 in St Thomas, west of the Exe and beyond the old city walls of Exeter. I, guiding vicar for the day, naturally drank tea. My friend and travelling companion David Chatton-Barker, instigator of the expedition under the aegis of the Folklore Tapes Tramping and Loring series of sonic investigations, washed down his bacon buttie with a cup of coffee. I regarded his hearty repast with a jealous eye. But I had forgotten my wallet, leaving with a paltry pocketful of change. A shorting of what is usually a reflex action upon leaving the flat, it was the first of a series of incidents which imposed an allegorical narrative upon the journey. I was the pilgrim travelling without means of support, trusting in the generosity of providence. We were both fools on bicycle steeds, venturing into the warren of Victorian terraced streets mazing their way to the village of Alphington. It was a bright morning thus far, and we set off at a relaxed and convivial pace. To the west, over the ridge of the Haldon Hills which were our destination, a solid wall of darkness divided the sky, its gloom-doomy front advancing with the steady pace of inexorable fate.

The hail hit as we approached the iron gates of Pincet Gardens, the words proudly wrought in black and gold Art Nouveau lettering. The gatehouse of these elegant Edwardian pleasure gardens, with their wisteria walk, rose beds and croquet lawn, provided sanctuary from the elements, as it once had for the groundsman, a figure from a publicly-spirited age long-dispensed with. The sheltering arch, and by symbolic extension of Victorian and Edwardian civic rectitude, allowed for the testing of sound levels and the consultation of maps. My Ordnance Survey map of Exeter and its surrounds dated from the inter-war period, the nerve network of local railway lines taking the place of the thick, wormy, blue arteries of motorways to come. It seemed appropriate that we should resort to such dated cartographic means to guide us. We were, in some ways, following in the footsteps or cycle tracks of inter-war British artists and writers like John Piper, Myfanwy Evans (later Piper) and Geoffrey Grigson, who had found inspiration from the medieval art they discovered in old country churches. Figures and faces carved in stone or from wood which appeared to them as immediate and modern as any of Picasso’s work derived from the art of ancient non-Western cultures.

Passing through the old village of Alphington, with its prospect over the city below, we left the boundaries of Exeter and turned onto an old country road which soon carried us over the Autobahn thrum of the A30. It was a crossing which felt significant, putting the functional roar of hurrying modernity behind us and leading us to older roads; lanes whose sparse usage allowed for ridges of hardy, tufted grass to draw a thick dividing line along their length, a rural version of the central reservation. In the village of Shillingford St George, we paused at a junction marked by an old stone cross, and crouched below the overarching beech tree, hunched against a fresh onslaught of hail. The small, frozen white pellets bombarded the moss landscape atop the flat plateaux of the cross’ arms like tiny meteorites crashing onto remote granite-bedded moorland. The right arm of the cross pointed to a lane which cut across the hillside, and we followed its transverse directions as if it were a signpost, which it may well have been. The dark mass of the hail cloud lumbered east over Exeter and the sky’s blue was all the more cerulean in contrast. There on the hill was the white tower, a radiant beacon capping the horizon of the Haldon Ridge rising above us. Haloed in a baroque nimbus of cumulus cloud, it drew us onward, a destination both symbolic and real. Once we reached this tower, the long, hard climb would be over and we could sail down the other side of the ridge to Ashton on the upper slopes of the Haldons.

As if to wake us from nebulous, cloudy dreaming and remind us that the tower was still some steep distance away, David’s faithful old steed Victor chose this moment to limp to a halt, its chain slipping off under the strain of steady ascent and firmly wedging itself between gear wheels. The venerable old bike was on its last legs, or spokes, and this was very likely to be one final, epic excursion before it was laid to rest. But it appeared as if the journey might prove too arduous for its aging frame after all. Desperate efforts to lever the chain out with a pitifully inadequate spanner were all in vain. It bent as if made from pliable plastic. Fingers were cut on gear teeth and blood mixed with oil, but even this sacrifice failed to release the chain. The shining tower was beginning to look like a taunting mirage, an elusive dream which would remain forever beyond our grasp. Even a sturdy old bronze key was unable to dislodge the stubborn links. Victor was mulish – he wasn’t going anywhere.

It was at this point that a Land Rover drove up and turned into the drive of the farmhouse outside of which the recalcitrant old bike was upended. David ran in to request aid and returned with a hefty steel spanner. Proper job! The chain was forced out and reset, the farmer profusely thanked, and we were on our way again. Victor was treated with the respect due to his frail seniority and led gently up any significant inclines, of which there were plenty to come. Reaching the end of the winding hillside lane, we arrived at a crossroads, a symbolic point which really marked the obstacle we had just overcome. The four-armed signpost pointed eastwards to Exeter, the direction in which we would have disconsolately limped had our serendipitous benefactor not happened along. But we now headed west, enjoying a brief descent, freewheeling and cheering, before the inevitable push to the heights of the neck-craning horizon.

Some distance up the hill, Victor now being pushed up the steadily increasing incline, we took a diversion to the north, following a short lane as it wound down into a sheltered dell. Here the red sandstone church of Dunchideock nestled, adjacent to the monkish quadrangle of a cluster of old farm buildings. We parked the bikes and prepared to walk through the small, unwalled graveyard to the church porch, eager to enter our first church of the day. It was at this point that David began patting pockets and rummaging through his bag with an escalating air of quiet desperation. The painful realisation dawned that his keys had been left lying in the road where Victor had experienced his breakdown. There was nothing for it but to go back and pick them up, hoping they would still be sprawling, keys akimbo, in the central spread, untwisted or flattened by the trundling passage of tractors. So it was downhill and up and turn south at the crossroads. And there they were. But a post van was rapidly approaching, filling up the lane with its purposeful progress and looking unlikely to take kindly to a cyclist dithering in its path. I swiftly stooped and snatched up the keys, pressing myself and my bike into the hedge to allow the envoy of the Royal Mail to pass. We would see him in the distance on several occasions during our journey, his van a small corpuscle pulsing along the hillside roads, a vital force yet, the lifeblood of the countryside. He was almost like a tutelary spirit, a background presence ready to intervene at opportune moments.

Another obstacle to the quest had been overcome. The third symbolic mishap, the loss of the key. Firstly, I had come out without any money, reminding us of the pilgrim’s need to rely on the generosity of the world and its inhabitants. Secondly, the venerable Victor had become lame, requiring stretches of the journey to be made on foot. This necessitated a slowing of the pace, a slight alteration of the schedule, and led to a more contemplative state of mind .The journey is a fundamental component of the quest, the time in which significant encounters take place and vital lessons are learned. This incident served to remind us of this, the meeting with the farmer being an example of the world providing in our time of need. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to reach your destination, you may find that in your speed to arrive you lose your sense of purpose. The loss of the keys made me retrace our path and notice the storm clouds sweeping over Exeter, slanted hail connecting cloud and earth like smudged pencil shading. The tower above was still illuminated, however, a castle in the clouds, and the hail passed us by. The keys, once retrieved, seemed to represent a symbolic blessing. The way is now open to you, they said.

I returned to Dunchideock church. A richly rolling nameplace, a pleasure to ennunciate. It’s name, in the old Celtic language, meant the wooded fort. The high places of the Haldon ridge had long been seen as an advantageous site to set up camp. They were now crowned by a white tower which had more recent and far-reaching military connotations, as we were about to discover. It set its gaze far eastwards, but also inward to the mysteries of the human heart.

I found David wandering around the graveyard, recording its atmospheres and ambient sounds. As often proves the case, the stone garden, planted with the dead, was full of life. Graveyards are often oases of nature, residual respect for sanctified resting places leaving them largely undisturbed. The flat granite and slate planes of gravestones also provide a highly amenable environment for hillocks of moss and the slow-spreading, symbiotic stains of lichens. If the dates on the graves have been erased by weather and time, they can be aged by the extent of the lichenous growth across their surface – the arcane science of lichenometry. There are some splendid specimens in the Dunchideock graveyard; efflorescent orange suns, pale green planetary discs and vermillion nebulae. Whole lichen universes expand across the grey stone, life blooming in a wholly different dimension, a long, slow, silent millennial explosion.

Mosses also thrive on the stone surfaces, finding root in the clefts formed by the stonemason’s chisel as he carved out memorial words. These are now traced in green lettering, a moist, green language. These growths also spread across the tomb flatlands, arms extending in ecstatic nebular outreach. Elsewhere, ivy eagerly grasps the corners of the tabletop tombs which invite convivial day of the dead feasting. They crawl onto their flat surfaces and crack open exit doors for their inhabitants whilst shielding their names with thickly twined knots of woody vine, allowing them the blessed relief of anonymity.

The north side of the graveyard was sparsely inhabited. The sun-warmed south side of the graveyard has always been considered more favoured ground. The shadowy north side is more sinister, more prone to intrusions from elsewhere – the Devil’s side. Those buried there might be considered unfit to keep company with the respectable southerners. Those whose lives had been tainted by scandal, who had committed crimes which had not been forgotten, or sorrowful suicides sufficiently beloved in the locality to be granted hallowed rest. Or, of course, those who were simply too poor to gain access to holier ground.

At the base of the stone arch framing one of the windows on the north side, the carved heads of a monk and nun looked out over the graveyard. Their faces were filled with grace and benediction, red lichen lending them a flush of rubicund life. They had the appearance of graveyard guardians, their calm, assured regard enough to stare down all but the most malevolent and powerful demons. To the north, the darkness was gathering itself together once more and advancing towards. The bright suncreated stark, Manichean contrasts between light and shadow. It was time to seek shelter – sanctuary if you will.

The interior of the church was neat and compact, a very tidy and well-ordered space. Not that there weren’t a few church spiders in residence, shading in the coiled curlicue at the tip of a crozier or lacing their webs through the wooden vines of the decorated rood screen. The red brick of the exterior was continued inside. Aisle columns were built from local red sandstone, chromatically consonant with the ruddy cast of the surrounding soil. The columns are rough and particulate, compacted amalgams of pebbly matter. It looks like the space around them could have been excavated from the Haldon hillside itself, leaving its bones exposed. That this is a sacralised quarry raised from its subterranean pit.

The rood screen separating nave from sacristy, the worldly and quotidian from the holy and eternal, looks Victorian. It’s a reflection of the 19th century desire to reach back to a pre-industrial past, retreating into a dream medievalism, conjuring up a simpler world which, of course, never really existed. It does in fact date from the 15th century, but was extensively restored by Herbert Read in 1893. Read had set up business in Exeter as a church conservator and craftsman in 1888, so this was a relatively early job for him. He also carved the wooden pulpit, its facets inhabited by fiercely bearded representations of the missionaries of the early church in Britain: St Columba, St Augustine, St Boniface and St Petrock. They are framed by trailing greenery in which birds alertly perch, plucking succulent grapes and snapping up climbing snails.

It’s hard not to notice the sizeable marble monument which takes up a large part of the north aisle wall. The wordy white tablet is capped with the black outline of an obelisk at the top of which a medallion-framed relief portrait of its subject is embedded, like an oversized pocket memento of a loved one. A war drum lies on the tomb, its beating silenced, a cessation akin in this case to the termination of the heart’s lifebeat. This is the memorial to Major General Stringer Lawrence, who died in 1775. Sometimes referred to as ‘the Father of the Indian Army’, he was the commander of the East India Company troops (a clear indication of the commercial imperatives behind Empire). His military exploits were instrumental in establishing the British presence in India – of building an Empire in the East. The language on the tomb is unabashed in its imperial pride, celebrating victory and conquest and proclaiming Stringer Lawrence as a saviour ‘born to command, to conquer, and to spare,/As mercy mild, yet terrible, as war’ in the words of Hannah More’s epitaph.

The memorial was funded by Sir Robert Palk, the Governor of Madras and at one time paymaster to the Indian Army. Stringer Lawrence lived with Palk for the last 6 years of his life in the nearby Haldon House. Hannah More writes ‘in vain this frail memorial friendship rears,/His dearest monument’s an army’s tears’. She could well have been referring to Palk, though. He clearly bore a great love for the old soldier. Not only did he name his son Lawrence, with the Major General acting as his godfather, but he raised a further, even grander monument in the form of the white tower on the hill. Few now recognise it as Lawrence Castle, but such was it designated, dedicated to Palk’s dear friend when the building was completed in 1788. It stands as much as a testament to one man’s love for another as it does to the Major General’s prowess in battle. With such knowledge, the tower becomes something else. A symbol of desolation, isolation, of unassuageable sorrow. Something has gone out of the world, something which you loved above all else, and it’s never coming back.

A small plaque on the south wall facing the Stringer Lawrence memorial bears much quieter and less triumphal witness to a parishioner who died on the fields of Flanders in the First World War. Similar records can be found in or near almost every parish church in the country. They particularise the terrible, blank magnitude of wartime mortality statistics, rooting them in specific place, in the family names engraved in the graveyard library. The gravestone chapters of lived local history, of generational lineage are brought to a sudden, violent halt. Unwritten pages are torn out of the book of life and cast to the wind.

The imperial atmosphere generated by Stringer Lawrence’s memorial seems to permeate the rest of the church. The 15th century roof bosses are arrayed in a brightly painted cavalcade of heads and masks, beasts and mythical creatures. A Turk with luxuriant black moustache focuses his bright, sharp gaze down on our craning heads. A crescent is affixed to the brow of his turbaned headdress. Adjacent to him is a lion’s head with a corona of gold mane. Its eyes are wild almonds and a sugary red tongue lolls pantingly out. It resembles stylised Chinese or Indian iconography more than the Christian artistic styles of Western Europe in the late medieval period. The colours are gaudy and gay, boldly carnivalesque, the roof a noisy parade of disparate, wildly contrasting participants. Here are three fish linked in a tail-biting Trinity circle, a plushly red triangular shield their sensual centre. A raw, phallic extrusion, seemingly emerging from the fish’s scales, tentatively probes this sacred ground. Around thethe fishes, golden fruits are slashed open to reveal scarlet flesh. The whole is an amalgam of Western animal symbolism and Indian Shiva lingam, a universal hymn to abundance and generation.

More symbolism comes in the traditional form of the Green Man. Or is it a foliate head? One such here seems to be a Green Man in profile (‘just carve my best side’), a branch emerging from the side of the mouth to wrap around its head in an oval foliate portrait frame. Its large, exaggeratedly upswerving nose gives it a jesterish look. The gold leaves could almost be bells on its softly pointed hat. The sky blue, red and gold colours make it a creature air, blood and sun as much as wood, leaf and earth. Another foliate face is the flowering bud at the heart of a spiral of light green vine and gold leaf. I am the true vine – a powerful symbol of the uncoiling spring of life’s seasonal cycle.

The circling vines are echoed in the whimple headdresses which frame the female heads which are present in some number. These are Hollywood Technicolor representations of medieval femininity. But given that they actually date from the late medieval period, the usual grumbles about authenticity are made redundant. This female presence in the church, and the rainbow rejection of grey sobriety the gay boss figures present in general, acts as a welcome counterbalance to the martial, male memorial, with its priapically erect obelisk reaching up to the roof (but not quite reaching its lofty heights).

This celebratory, polychromatic spirit even spreads to a memento mori skull at the base of a 1697 memorial to one Marthae Bryant. The bony visage is given an gleaming gold gilding, eye sockets glowing with corporeal redness, as if the fires of life were still burning somewhere within. The missing teeth in the jaw hinted at a verisimilitude reproduced with disturbing precision.

David had not been idle whilst I was on my key-retrieving side quest. He had discovered an old harmonium in a quiet corner of the Lady Chapel and had set to working its wooden pedals and filling the church with creaking, reedy chords and arpeggios – sounding out its sandstone corners and wooden arches and recording the results. The upper E note was fixed in permanent depression, as if someone had become addicted to its keening drone, lost in the expanding clouds of overtones. As David produced a few more chords in my presence, I could almost hear the faint ghost voices of Nico and Ivor Cutler (a very odd duet) drifting in from the aether beyond.

It was a hypnotic sound. But we couldn’t allow ourselves to drift too long into harmonium reverie. We still had to reach the heights of the white tower, Robert Palk’s shining declaration of pure love and heartbroken loss for his Major General. We emerged to blue skies, the dark sweep of the storm front menacing Exeter safely below us to the east. Onward and upward, we traversed the short lane dipping into the rounded cleft of the valley fold in which Dunchideock nestled and rejoined the road climbing steeply to the summit of the Haldon ridge. In deference to the venerable Victor, this was a walk and push stretch, companionable conversation interspersed with huffing and puffing and other assorted exhalations. Finally, we attained the summit, and were rewarded with stunning views across the Teign Valley to the tor-knubbed horizon of Dartmoor.

The road traced the spine of the ridge, and we followed its blessedly flat track until we reached our turning, the sign pointing to the downward slope leading to Doddiscombsleigh and Ashton. The white tower was immediately above us, pristinely outlined against luminous blue sky. A plane contrail etched its cloudy line across the outlines of winter branches. We debated about taking a short detour and exploring it, but decided that it would serve us better as a symbol, a tower of fable. The fact that it was now behind us indicated that we had reached the goal to which it had guided us, acting as an everpresent beacon. ‘To the tower and to the ravens’ as Sandy sang, although we had to make do with crows. We had made the ascent, and the route to Ashton was now open to a joyful freewheeling glide.

The valleys before us, with their folds and wooded slopes, curving streams and sheep-flocked fields, were enveloped in a dreamy afternoon haze softly obscure distances suggestive of nebulous Samuel Palmer Edens. We paused under the power lines strung between the grasping iron arms of pylons which strode in receding formation across the hillside, coniferous plantations magically parting to permit their progress. Their hum and crackle formed the droning ground over which birdsong, a crow of a cock and the passing sigh of a single car were laid – a rich rural mix. There was even a bit of stereo panning as a surge or stutter in the electron flow sent the electric drone pulsing behind us and then ahead before resuming its steady OHM drone. I felt like joining in, adding human overtone harmonies to the technological oscillations. This would sound great mixed with the harmonium respirations, I thought. A blend of exterior and exterior drone atmosphere, the electronic combined with the organic, wood with wire.

Passing beneath the pylon wires was like crossing some kind of threshold. Shortly thereafter, we entered an avenue of dark evergreen trees, and the Ashton sign appeared at the side of the road. The descent into the village was an exhilarating whoosh, the church tower suddenly appearing above thatched, whitewashed cottages. We parked our bikes at the foot of the church wall and climbed the steep, uneven steps which wound around to the lychgate rising greenly above us. We had arrived at Ashton, the main church on our itinerary. Our quest was reaching its fruition. It was time to pause for a well-earned sandwich in the porch, followed by a celebratory segment of Kendal Mint Cake. Hell, let’s make it two.

Your Ascension continues here:
PART TWO

And finally descends here:
PART THREE