In spring 1989 my wife and I were driving from some place in northern England to some other place. We were doing our usual traveling thing, not planning where we were going and driving fairly randomly using Ordnance Survey maps.
On that day, I think we started from near Carlisle and drove from west to east along Hadrian's Wall, and then we headed south. It was a long day and we'd been driving for what seemed like forever over high moors, commons, and fells -- wild, empty, round hilltops. We'd stopped occasionally to walk around and we heard a curlew cry. It was getting around 7:30 or so when we came into a town. We drove into the town center, parked, and walked down the main street. It was getting onto being late evening, the dark blue sky was full of big grey clouds moving along at a pretty good clip. On a grassy patch in the center of the street were two tall May Poles, red streamers flying nearly horizontal in the wind. In our traveling fever we had forgotten that it was May Day.
We heard a commotion coming up the street and we were fairly amazed to see a Morris dancing troupe, beer and ale in hand, walking and skipping our way. They stopped near us and began a dance. I looked away, day-dreaming just briefly, and the jester ran over and hit me in the belly with the goat's bladder or stomach or whatever it is he carries on his stick. Hit me hard, too, and it made me jump back. They were a jolly, rowdy lot.
We found a place to stay, West Rood Farm outside town. The farm was putting up quite a few Morris dancers who were camping in what looked like a small area that had been quarried for stone in the past. The woman and her husband who owned the farm were an interesting couple. The husband obviously wanted the farm to stay a working one. He kept out of sight most of the time. His wife was a gregarious dowser who had been one of the subjects of a BBC documentary on the subject. She ran the B&B and camping business.
That night we went back into town to try to get into a ceilidh one of the dancers on the farm had told us about. We stood outside the Town Hall where the ceilidh has literally rocking the upstairs. I can't remember the music, but my wife tells me someone was playing a shawm, a blatting medieval instrument of the oboe class. Even down on the street, the slam of dancing feet on the floor upstairs was deafening. We couldn't get in. I said, "but we've come all the way from Tennessee." The lady at the door replied that they had already exceeded the number for fire regulations. So we went away. Sad, sad...
The next day the Morris dancers were all over Barnard Castle. Dancing in the streets, dancing on sidewalks, dancing inside stores (for good luck we were told). I remember one particular group dancing inside a video store. They were a great, lively group, but it was an odd sight.
Soon, we found ourselves at the country fair outside town. It was festive to say the least. There was a falconry exhibition and a horse show with great, huge draft horses. I'm sure I'm not remembering it right, but about every third guy there looked like Ian Anderson (the singer/flute player in Jethro Tull) -- wild men in tweeds and wellies, blue laser beam eyes, high cheekbones grizzled with hair and broken blood vessels, stick-carrying country men.
We set out early the next day and, putting along slowly on a narrow curving road in the foggy morning, a large owl drifted down in front of our windshield from right to left. We went around curve. A stream ran along a steep bank below the road. A family of rabbits, including several small ones, huddled in the grass between the top of the bank and the road. We wondered off and on all day about the fate of those rabbits.
(Barnard Castle is located on the A67 south of Newcastle. The River Tees runs through town. A 12th-century castle is there, built by the Baliols of Baliol College fame, and added onto by Richard III. When we visited, the town and area around, it seemed kind of wild and isolated. It felt like we'd been given a great gift to stumble into the place on May Day. Don't know what it's like there now.)