Notable Landmarks · Padstow, Cornwall
Padstow 'Obby 'Oss May Day Festival
Cornwall's riotous May Day rite where being caught under the 'Oss means a baby (or a husband) within the year. The 'ancient pagan fertility rite' story is a 20th-century folklorist invention (per Ronald Hutton), though the custom itself is genuinely old.
The story
Padstow's 'Obby 'Oss is the loudest, wildest May Day custom in England. It begins at midnight on 30 April, when the Cornish town gathers outside the Golden Lion to sing the Night Song; by morning the streets are dressed in greenery around the maypole. Then the two 'Osses appear — the Old (Red) 'Oss and the Blue Ribbon 'Oss — each a man inside a six-foot black hooped frame hung with tarpaulin, topped with a snapping masked head, and goaded through the town by a club-wielding Teaser. Accordions, drums and the whole town singing follow behind. Every so often the 'Oss lunges and traps a young woman under its black skirt: the belief is that she'll be married or pregnant within the year, and in the older version there was tar or blacking under there to mark her.
It feels thousands of years old. But — as Ronald Hutton has shown — the first written record is only 1803, an account by Richard Polwhele of a man in a horse's skin dipping his head in puddles and dousing the crowd. There's no proof it predates the eighteenth century. And the famous "ancient pagan fertility rite" reading wasn't handed down by Padstonians at all: it was pinned on by outside folklorists — Francis Etherington in 1907, then Thurstan Peter in 1913, steeped in Frazer's The Golden Bough. That interpretation then seeped back into the town, so completely that when Hutton visited in 1985 the locals described their own custom to him in exactly those imported terms.
None of which makes it any less real or less Padstow's own. Hutton calls it one of the most dramatic folk customs of modern Britain and a tremendous reaffirmation of communal pride. The custom is authentic; the pagan pedigree is borrowed; the town dances regardless, and it is unforgettable. Expect thousands of people packed into narrow streets — arrive early, wear red or blue, and sing.
More stories at this spot
Sources
- Wikipedia
- Tradfolk
- Cambridge Core / Antiquity (Plot 1686 text reproduced)
- Wikipedia (Abbots Bromley Horn Dance)
- Beltane Fire Society
- Historic Environment Scotland
Nearby on the map
The wave-battered headland bound by legend to Tristan and Iseult — the knight sent to fetch his king's bride, the love-potion drunk in error, the doomed passion that medieval Europe told and retold. Folklore, and labelled so; the drama of the place is entirely factual.
LegendLiterary PassionMenabilly (Daphne du Maurier's Manderley)Fowey, Cornwall · EnglandThe hidden house du Maurier trespassed into as a young woman and loved all her life — the original of Manderley, whose dreaming opening line the world knows by heart. 'Rebecca' made obsession, jealousy and a dead woman's unseen erotic power into a national bestseller.
Fact & fictionNotable LandmarksMên-an-TolMadron, Cornwall · EnglandCornwall's famous fertility stone — crawl through the ring to conceive. The fertility/healing folklore is genuinely recorded, though the 'seven times at full moon' formula is largely a modern accretion.
Documented historySpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.