Our wonderful Town Cryer, George, will be retiring shortly. In fact, his last ever "shout" will be at the Christmas Market on Saturday 13th December.
It's hard to believe that he's been doing the job for sixteen years!
He's going to be a hard act to follow!
I couldn't go to the Dial-a-Ride Carol Concert this year, because I was at a meeting of the Cusop History Group committee organising the archaeological work at Cusop Castle next year on the same afternoon. I'll report more nearer the time, but it's very exciting to be involved in real archaeology again.
So I missed something unexpected and well deserved. During the concert, Mary Fellowes was honoured with a certificate and bouquet for all her hard work keeping Dial-a-Ride on the road.
Mary was one of the founder members of Dial-a-Ride, and she raised money for minibuses, and did a lot of organising behind the scenes, and put in a huge amount of hard work to keep it going over the years.
It's nice to see her being appreciated like this, and I'm sorry I missed it.
At least a photographer from the Brecon and Radnor Express was there - Mary looks quite surprised in the photo!
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.
