I was going to just huddle at home after I'd been to see the Craftland talk at the church - but I had noticed that there were free music events in between the Festival talks up at the Castle. One of them was the Blackthorn Ritualistic Folk.
Anyway, early in the afternoon I decided to listen to a podcast. Next on my list was Druidcast - and Damh the Bard was interviewing his friend Phil, who is one of the Blackthorn Ritualistic Folk group. It was such an interesting interview that I had to go and see them in action after that.
They are influenced by Border Morris - the sort where they bang sticks together - but they put together their own dances. They wear black tatters, and each dancer has an individual hat or head dress, sometimes based on the dancer's totem animal (there was a girl with a brilliant fox mask).
I saw three dances (there was another session later that night that I didn't go out for).
They started as a choir, singing a Pagan song about the changing seasons. Then they performed a dance based on the Skirrid Inn, where a horse skull was found under the floor (no-one knows why it was put there). They have their own, blue, horse skull, which is not a Mari Llwyd, but an English variant - I can't remember the name.
The second dance was based on the Anemone, the Flower of Death, and the third was a solo Irish jig in honour of the Black Hairstreak moth, which only lives in hedgerows where blackthorn grows.
There wasn't a lot of room in the Castle Great Hall - the group has about fifty members, so they were only able to do a cut down version of their usual performances, but it was great fun, and a good taste of the sort of thing that they do.
At the end of the performance Nino, a stray Shantyman, passed by. The friend I was standing with said that the Hay Shantymen's performance had been packed out, earlier in the afternoon.
