The Border Country
Traditions That Exist Because of the Welsh-English Frontier, and the People Who Carry Them
The border between England and Wales is not like other English boundaries. It is not a county line drawn by administrators or a river adopted as a convenience. It is a frontier - older than the nation it divides, contested for longer than any other boundary in these islands, and marked in the landscape by a massive eighth-century earthwork that runs, intermittently, for 177 miles from the Dee estuary to the Severn. Offa’s Dyke was built to separate. It was built to say: this side is ours, that side is yours. And in the twelve centuries since it was raised, the territory on the English side of that line - the Welsh Marches, the border country - has developed a culture that is unlike anything found deeper into England or further into Wales. It is a culture of defiance, of independence, of fierce local identity forged in a place where belonging was never guaranteed. And the traditions that survive in this country carry the marks of that history in ways that their practitioners understand instinctively, even if they do not always articulate them.
The Marches stretch from Shropshire in the north through Herefordshire and into the fringes of Gloucestershire in the south. This is country of small market towns and scattered farms, of deep red soil and half-timbered houses, of orchards and hop yards and lanes that follow paths laid down before the Conquest. It is also country that has always been difficult to govern. The Marcher Lords, installed by William I to hold the frontier, operated with a degree of autonomy unknown elsewhere in medieval England - they could wage war, build castles, and administer justice without royal permission. That autonomy seeped into the culture of the people who lived beneath the castles, and something of it remains. The border country carries its traditions not as quaint survivals but as assertions of identity, performed by people who know exactly what they mean.
The Horn Dance
On the Monday following the first Sunday after the fourth of September - Wakes Monday - twelve performers gather at the parish church of St Nicholas in Abbots Bromley, a village in eastern Staffordshire, on the edge of the old Needwood Forest. Six of them carry reindeer antlers mounted on short wooden poles. The antlers are heavy, between roughly sixteen and twenty-five pounds each, and they are old. Radiocarbon dating carried out in 2005 established that the antlers date from approximately 1065 AD, give or take eighty years. They may be older. They are almost certainly the oldest ritual objects still in active ceremonial use in Europe.
The six deer-men are accompanied by a fool, a hobby horse, a bowman, and Maid Marian - a man dressed as a woman, in the ancient tradition of ritual inversion. A musician plays a melodeon. A boy carries a triangle. Together, this company processes through the village and out into the surrounding parish, covering a route of approximately ten miles over the course of the day, stopping at farms, houses, pubs, and crossroads to perform the dance. The dance itself is simple: the deer-men form two lines and advance towards each other, antlers raised, in a slow, rhythmic movement that suggests combat or courtship or both. They retreat, turn, and advance again. The pattern repeats. There is no narrative. There is no explanation. The dance is the thing itself.
The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance is performed by the same families, generation after generation. The Bentley family has provided dancers since at least the early twentieth century and possibly much longer - parish records are incomplete, and the dance’s organisational memory is oral rather than written. The antlers are kept in the church between performances, hung on a wall in the tower, where they have been stored for centuries. They are taken down on the morning of the dance and returned at the end of the day. No one else may carry them. No one else may use them. The dance belongs to Abbots Bromley and to the families who perform it, and this exclusivity is not negotiable.
Scholars have argued about the dance’s origins for two centuries without reaching consensus. The reindeer antlers are the central puzzle: reindeer were extinct in England by the twelfth century, which means the antlers were either imported or preserved from a much earlier period. Some scholars connect the dance to pre-Christian hunting rituals. Others link it to forest rights - a symbolic assertion of the villagers’ entitlement to hunt in Needwood Forest at a time when such rights were being curtailed by Norman forest law. The border location is significant. Abbots Bromley sits near the old boundary between Mercia and the Danelaw, in territory that has been contested since the seventh century. Whatever the dance once meant, it has survived because the community that performs it has never stopped performing it - through the Reformation, through the Civil War, through industrialisation, through two world wars, through every force that might have ended it. That continuity is itself the meaning now.
The Wassail
In January, in the orchards of Herefordshire, people gather after dark to wake the apple trees. The wassail - from the Old English wæs hæl, “be in good health” - is a midwinter ritual designed to ensure a good cider apple harvest in the coming year. Cider, in the border country, is not a drink. It is an economy, an identity, and a relationship with the land that stretches back to at least the thirteenth century, when Herefordshire’s orchards were already famous. The wassail is the ceremonial expression of that relationship, and in the Marches it has survived with a directness and intensity that distinguishes it from the gentler wassailing traditions found further south and west.
The form varies from parish to parish, but the core elements are consistent. A procession goes to the orchard. The largest or oldest apple tree - the Apple Tree Man - is selected. Cider is poured over its roots. Pieces of toast soaked in cider are placed in its branches, an offering to the robins, who are the good spirits of the orchard. Then the noise begins. Shotguns are fired through the branches. Pots and pans are beaten. The wassail song is sung - and the Herefordshire wassail songs are particular, different from village to village, passed down in versions that have drifted from each other over centuries of oral transmission. The purpose of the noise is to wake the tree from its winter sleep and to drive away evil spirits that might blight the crop. The purpose of the cider is to give back to the tree what the tree has given.
The wassail nearly died in Herefordshire. By the mid-twentieth century, the orchards themselves were in decline - grubbed out for arable land or abandoned as cheap imported cider concentrate undercut the local product. The wassail survived in only a handful of parishes, kept alive by farming families who continued the practice as a private observance even when no audience came. The revival began in the 1970s and 1980s, driven in part by the Campaign for Real Ale and the broader interest in traditional cider, and in part by local people who recognised that the wassail was slipping away and refused to let it go.
Today, the Herefordshire wassail is thriving in its way, though “thriving” requires qualification. The large public wassails - at Marcle Ridge, at Much Marcle, at Leominster - draw crowds and attention. But the smaller, private wassails, the ones that take place on a single farm with a single family and a few neighbours, are fewer each year. These are the ones that carry the real tradition, unperformed and uncommented-upon, and their loss is not dramatic enough to notice until it has already happened.
The Border Morris
Morris dancing in England divides, roughly, into regional traditions: Cotswold morris from the south Midlands, Northwest morris from Lancashire and Cheshire, and border morris from the Welsh Marches. The differences are not subtle. Where Cotswold morris is precise, choreographed, and performed in white with bells and baldrics, border morris is rough, loud, and dark. The dancers black their faces - or, in recent decades, paint them in colours - wear ragged coats decorated with strips of fabric, and carry sticks which they strike together with genuine force. The music is faster, the stepping heavier, the atmosphere more confrontational. If Cotswold morris is a display, border morris is a challenge.
The blackened faces are the most contentious element, and the most revealing. The practice almost certainly predates any connection to racial caricature - the earliest references to disguised or blacked-up dancers in the Marches date from the seventeenth century, and the most plausible explanation is that the disguise served a practical purpose. Border morris was danced in winter, at a time of year when agricultural workers had no income and went begging from house to house. Blacking the face prevented recognition, which prevented the shame of being identified as a beggar, and also prevented retribution from householders who might object to the implied threat in the dancers’ approach: dance for us and we will bring you luck; refuse us and we will not. Many border morris sides have replaced the blacking with painted designs - green, blue, red - retaining the principle of disguise while abandoning a practice that, whatever its origins, became impossible to maintain in its original form.
The border morris sides that survive are concentrated in Herefordshire, Shropshire, and the fringes of Worcestershire. They dance at midwinter - the traditional season - and at summer gatherings and folk festivals. The squire of a border morris side is its organiser, its keeper of tradition, and often its oldest member. In the smaller sides, the squire carries the whole thing: recruiting dancers, arranging performances, maintaining the kit, and holding the repertoire of dances in memory. The role is not hereditary in the formal sense, but it passes from person to person within a small community, and when no one comes forward to take it on, the side folds.
The demographic challenge is acute. The villages of the Welsh Marches are among the most sparsely populated in England. Young people leave for the cities. Incomers arrive but do not always integrate into the ritual life of the community. A border morris side needs eight dancers minimum, plus musicians, and in a village of three hundred people, finding eight who are willing to learn the dances, attend rehearsals, and turn out on a cold January evening is not always possible. The sides that endure do so through sheer persistence - the refusal of a few individuals to let the tradition lapse on their watch.
The Coracles at Ironbridge
The River Severn at Ironbridge runs fast and deep through the gorge that gave the town its name. On this stretch of water, for centuries, men fished from coracles - small, oval boats made from a framework of split willow or ash covered with a tarred hide, light enough for one person to carry on their back and manoeuvrable enough to work the eddies and pools of a fast river. The Severn coracle is a distinct type, different from the Welsh coracle of the Teifi or the Tywi: broader, flatter-bottomed, designed for a wider and more powerful river. Its construction is specific to the Severn and to the people who fished it.
Coracle fishing on the Severn was a working practice, not a pastime. Pairs of coraclemen would stretch a net between their boats and drift downstream, catching salmon and the once-abundant Severn twaite shad. The right to fish by coracle was ancient and jealously guarded - specific families held licences that passed from father to son, and the number of licensed coraclemen was fixed by custom and regulation. The last commercial coracle fishermen on the Severn worked into the 1970s. After that, the practice survived as a heritage activity, maintained by a small number of enthusiasts and by the annual coracle regatta at Ironbridge, which draws builders and paddlers from across Britain.
The coracle races at Ironbridge are not ancient. They date from the 1980s, a conscious revival designed to keep the craft alive by making it visible. But they serve a purpose that goes beyond entertainment. The races bring together the people who still know how to build and handle coracles, creating a context in which knowledge can be shared, skills can be demonstrated, and the next generation of builders can learn by watching. A coracle cannot be learned from a book. The proportions, the selection of materials, the tension of the skin, the balance point that determines whether the boat tracks straight or spins in circles - these things are transmitted by demonstration and by practice, and the races provide the occasion for that transmission.
What the Border Makes
These traditions - the Horn Dance, the wassail, the border morris, the coracle - are not connected by style or by content. They are connected by geography and by the particular character that geography produces. The Welsh Marches are a place where England becomes uncertain of itself. The accents shift. The place names mix English and Welsh. The landscape changes from the tame Midlands to something wilder, hillier, less settled. And in this uncertainty, traditions take on a weight they do not carry in more comfortable places. They become declarations. They become proof.
The proof is of continuity - that this community has been here, doing this thing, for longer than anyone can remember. It is proof of belonging - that these people have a right to this place and to the practices that define it. And it is proof of resistance - that the forces which have eroded traditional culture everywhere else in England have not yet prevailed here, though they press harder each year.
The carriers of these traditions do not, as a rule, romanticise what they do. The squire of a border morris side will tell you plainly about the difficulty of recruiting dancers, about the arguments over face-painting, about the evenings when only five people turn up to rehearsal and you cannot run a set. The keeper of the horn dance antlers will tell you about the insurance, the liability, the health and safety assessments that must now accompany a thousand-year-old ritual through the streets of a Staffordshire village. The wassail leader will tell you that the orchard is smaller than it was, that the old trees are dying, that the young ones do not fruit the way they should. These are not sentimental people. They are practical people doing an impractical thing because they believe it matters, and because they know that if they stop, no one else will start.
The border created these traditions. The border was a line across which raiding, trading, marrying, fighting, and borrowing went on for centuries, producing a culture that was neither wholly English nor wholly Welsh but something of its own. That culture is carried now by people who live in villages that are losing their schools, their shops, their pubs, and their young. The carriers persist. They carry because carrying is what the border country has always demanded - the stubborn, unsentimental insistence on doing the thing again, this year, the way it was done last year, because once you stop, the border closes, and what it held open is gone.
