A Square with Four Sides

August Bank Holiday weekend, Shrewsbury Folk Festival is on. I am supposed to be busy packing my bags for my holiday and tidying the Tortoise Loft. (No more posts from me for a while, but watch out for pictures and a report when I get back in September.)

But knowing there was folk dancing going on in The Square, and that the sun was shining, I allowed myself one hour off, and took my camera with me.

The first of the four sides I saw were One Step Beyond, doing Appalachian step dancing. They moved fast, and it was hard to catch them on camera.

Next up, Crook Morris, a mixed morris side: white shirts and hankies, amazing hats and high-energy dancing.

Two East Shropshire sides: The ladies of the Severn Gilders dance in clogs, while The Ironmen keep up the wild Border Morris tradition, with wooden staves, blackened faces and tatters.



The beautifully decorated Square makes a fine setting for morris dancing. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the hats from the hanging baskets!

And on that happy note, I’ll say farewell for now. See you back here in the second half of September, if I don’t see you in Melbourne.

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May Contain Nuts

It’s May. Time For another update on recent activity. First up, on May Day itself: Eric, my father had his 90th Birthday. Here he is on his special day:

My sister was visiting from London. So along with my mother and I the whole family were together. Friends kept turning up with presents and cards, relatives phoned. After lunch – Dad’s birthday choice of sausage, mash and peas, cooked by my sister – he found it a bit overwhelming. So he went off to his den for a spot of quiet computer programming.

‘Tis of a fair young maiden, and she lived down in Kent,
Arose one sunny morning, and she a nutting went….

You can’t have May without a spot of morris, can you? So I’ve been adding The Nutting Girl to my guitar repertoire. I am enjoying learning new songs and tunes, especially when I have worked out the chords for myself, as I did with this one. Thanks to inspiration from Graham Higgins, I’ve been tackling La Mer – now that’s tricky to master! But I am getting better at it. I started with chords off the web for La Mer, but Lady Franklin’s Lament is another one I have worked out for myself. It’s a real joy to have a guitar on hand again.

Shropshire Community Flickr Group are doing a ‘Photo a Day’ challenge for May. (Last year we did one in April.) I’m not always remembering to take a photo until the light is fading, but so far I’ve managed to keep up, although they’re not all quality shots! Here are a couple of them.

The rest are accumulating here.

Goodbye Summer!

Well, there we had it: the last Bank Holiday before Christmas, and not much sunshine for it. I didn’t get to the Shrewsbury Folk Festival, due to lack of money, but I did get to see a little of the dancing in The Square on the Saturday.

This crazy bunch are Pig Dyke Molly, from the Cambridgeshire Fens. Spectacular costumes and make up – they looked good against the old buildings in High Street.

 

This is Nodger, Pig Dyke’s mascot. A bit blurred as it was coming for me at the time!

 

 

 

 

Chinewrde Morris Dancers are a ladies side. Clogs and bobbins. The come from Kenilworth. Lively dancing and a grand noise from their large band of musicians.

 What did you do on the last weekend in August?