Outing | Have a May Day

Illustration by Christina Carpenter

This month is packed with folklore events to celebrate and there’s bound to be a local event near you to join in with or simply inspire you.

May Day itself on the first marks the start of summer. Often linked to the ancient festival of Beltane, look out for maypole or Morris dancing, bringing in the May (bringing in wildflowers), or celebrations around firepits with songs and stories.

Several English towns hold ‘Jack in the Green’ events where a ‘Green Man’ wreathed in oak is ‘slayed’ to release the spirit of summer – Hastings in East Sussex holds one of the most famous of these.

There are plenty of activities to help you get in touch with your folk side throughout the month, from the Furry Dances in Cornwall, to Garland Day in Dorset, Oak Apple Day in Shropshire to Grovely Forest Rights Day in Wiltshire.

You can, of course, also hold your own folk celebrations. Invite friends over for food around the firepit, hold a storytelling competition outdoors or make flower posies to give to friends.

This blog is taken from our Almanac pages, which each month look at things to note and notice, plan and do.

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How hard can it be | To Maypole Dance

What do you mean you’ve never danced around a maypole? What kind of misspent youth did you have? Don’t worry; we have some simple step-by-step instructions just in time

First, catch your maypole
If you’ve access to an already-standing pole, you can skip (hop and dance) this step. Otherwise, get a pole of at least 4m (try B&Q) and attach a number of long ribbons to it. You’ll need one ribbon per dancer, of which you’ll need eight, including yourself if dancing. Are you dancing? (Response: Are you asking?) Sink your pole firmly into some soil. In front of a church looks pretty but you’ll need to work with what you have.

Start choreographing
Gather your dancers and split them into an A team and a B team. Stand them around the pole at equal intervals from alternate teams, so A, B, A, B and so on. Brook no complaints from dancers; things are about to get a lot trickier.

Go in, out, in, out (but don’t shake it all about)
Concentrate now – this is no May Day Picnic. The A team dancers should skip clockwise around the maypole and B team dancers, anticlockwise. Don’t worry, you shouldn’t collide because… Dancers should skip alternately left and then right of the dancers they pass, going ‘over, under, over, under’ with their ribbons. Still with us? Good. On an ‘over’, pass your ribbon over the dancer coming towards you. On an ‘under’ duck under the ribbon of the dancer coming towards you. If you’re untangled at the end treat yourself to a flagon of mead.

The instructions above are from our May issue’s Miscellany pages, which are packed with seasonal silliness each month.

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Recipe | Maypole Cake

Whether you end up dancing or not, the Maypole encapsulates the month’s playful spirit – we think it’s the, er… icing on the cake

Makes 1 cake
350g rhubarb, cut into 1cm chunks
50g caster sugar
Zest and juice of 1 orange
300ml double cream, whipped
Icing sugar, for dusting

For the cake:
200g butter, softened
200g caster sugar
4 eggs
Zest and juice of 1 orange
200g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder

1 Preheat the oven to 180C/Fan 160C/ Gas 4. Put the rhubarb in a roasting tin, sprinkle over the sugar, orange zest and juice. Cover and cook for 15 mins, or until the rhubarb is soft, but not falling apart. Leave to cool.

2 To make the cake, beat the butter and sugar together until creamy. Add one egg at a time with a spoonful of flour to stop the mixture curdling.

3 Add the orange zest and juice. Fold in the flour and baking powder and pour into two greased and lined 20cm sandwich tins. Bake for around 20 mins, checking they’re cooked by piercing the middle with a skewer until it comes out clean. Leave in the tins for 15 mins before transferring to a rack to cool completely.

4 To serve, fold the rhubarb into the whipped cream and generously cover the base of one sponge with the mix. Sandwich the second cake on top and dust lightly with some icing sugar. To make a tabletop Maypole Use a knitting needle and 6mm-wide ribbons. Tie the ribbons to the top of the needle and pierce the cake, leaving the ribbons to stream around or tuck them underneath the base of the sponge.

This Maypole Cake recipe is just one of the recipes from our May ‘gathering’ feature which we’ve called ‘Come What May’. It’s a menu for a Whitsun Get-Together, hopefully in the sunshine (British weather allowing) and also incudes recipes for Quick Elderflower & Rosemary Cordial, Pickled Radish on Rye, Whitsun Warldorf Salad, Asparagus & Pea Quiche and Herby Broadbean Couscous. The recipes are by Lucy Brazier and the photographs by Jonathan Cherry.

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