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Milton Abbas Maypole Dancing
Went with the Cloggies to Milton Abbas street fair today. It's a very popular local event in a very picturesque village. It's very well organised and pretty well every house in the village is involved one way or another.
This photo by Joe D shows the thatched cottages of the main street very well.
There's an interesting history as to why the village has such a pretty row of identical thatched cottages. Essentially, the old town of Middleton was in the way of Lord Milton's view where he wanted to landscape his grounds, so he paid an architecht to design a new village in a nearby valley and moved all the villagers into it when it was complete. By the standards of 1780, they're pretty good buildings, so I don't think the villagers were that badly treated. More details here
The street fair is on the front lawns of all the houses, and also involves the church, the almshouses and pretty well every square inch you can find.
Outside the old school, they had maypole dancing with the local children.
British maypole dancing is done with ribbons attached to the top of the maypole. Each child (It's almost always a children's dance) holds a ribbon, and the ribbons wind around the pole as they skip round. There are several basic patterns. The simplest one is a basic barber's pole, done by simply dancing round in a circle. Then you get a more complex weave - the children stand facing one another in pairs and then go round the pole passing alternate right and left shoulders. The most complex one is a tent in which every other child stands still and holds their ribbon taut and the other children dance round each child in turn to make a tent-like pattern with the maypole as the tent pole.
Here's a fairly typical picture. The boys have done a candy stripe one way, and the girls are adding a second layer in the other direction.
This dance is a relatively recent tradition, dating back to the 18th century.
There are older traditions (nearly all lost) of dancing around a maypole, but these were a different kind of dance.
Vera, I want to link to your entry on Czech maypole customs, but you don't use many tags in your journal. If you can find it, could you please put a link in the comments? I'd like people to be able to compare the different maypole customs.
This photo by Joe D shows the thatched cottages of the main street very well.
There's an interesting history as to why the village has such a pretty row of identical thatched cottages. Essentially, the old town of Middleton was in the way of Lord Milton's view where he wanted to landscape his grounds, so he paid an architecht to design a new village in a nearby valley and moved all the villagers into it when it was complete. By the standards of 1780, they're pretty good buildings, so I don't think the villagers were that badly treated. More details here
The street fair is on the front lawns of all the houses, and also involves the church, the almshouses and pretty well every square inch you can find.
Outside the old school, they had maypole dancing with the local children.
British maypole dancing is done with ribbons attached to the top of the maypole. Each child (It's almost always a children's dance) holds a ribbon, and the ribbons wind around the pole as they skip round. There are several basic patterns. The simplest one is a basic barber's pole, done by simply dancing round in a circle. Then you get a more complex weave - the children stand facing one another in pairs and then go round the pole passing alternate right and left shoulders. The most complex one is a tent in which every other child stands still and holds their ribbon taut and the other children dance round each child in turn to make a tent-like pattern with the maypole as the tent pole.
Here's a fairly typical picture. The boys have done a candy stripe one way, and the girls are adding a second layer in the other direction.
This dance is a relatively recent tradition, dating back to the 18th century.
There are older traditions (nearly all lost) of dancing around a maypole, but these were a different kind of dance.
Vera, I want to link to your entry on Czech maypole customs, but you don't use many tags in your journal. If you can find it, could you please put a link in the comments? I'd like people to be able to compare the different maypole customs.
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I love this one! The village looks really nice and the children´s dancing is great!
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I'll look forward to reading about your maypole all over again.
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Thank you!
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