We love a bit of Grimspound, so of course we’re going to be joining them for a knees up at their 30th birthday! Though if you ask us, they don’t look a day over 21
We’re delighted to be invited by the wonderful Two Bridges Hotel to come and dance on their most resplendent of forecourts again this May. An absolutely magical spot in the middle of the best bit of the moor. Come and join us for a drink, a dance (actually please don’t dance - that’s our job... well, not exactly a job, more of a habit, really), and a singsong.
We’ll be joined on this hopefully sunny evening by Dartmoor Border Morris
The lack of whimsy in the title for this particular evening spectacle is extremely intentional! At least a few of us Beltaners (including yours truly) has turned up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to A Church House Inn in the greater Devon area, only to be flummoxed at the lack of their corvid brethren making a menace of themselves. And especially as the Church House Inn at Stokeinteignhead is such a lovely pub, you really don’t want to not be there! Come and see us dance over a drink and dinner, and we’ll see you in the pub afterwards.
We love The Beer Engine and we’re stoked to be dancing here with Shumba African Drums! If that sounds like your cup of char, you'd better be at the Beer Engine on this particular Thursday.
This pub is positively made for Morris - just look at all that lovely space. We’ll be joined by the epic Cogs and Wheels - so get down there quicksmart to bag your seat!
Join us and 20 other sides for a jolly good knees up at the amazing Teignmouth Folk Festival - just check out that epic line-up of folk music!
How lucky are we?! We get to play at our absolute favouritest pubs this season, including this gem at the top of town in Totnes. Usually welcoming us in after our exertions on St George’s day, they are kindly giving us corvids a nest for an evening of dance, song and libations. That being said, we may well be dancing in town somewhere first as we need a bit of space to spread our wings, and we are of course massive posers and thrive on adulation. So come and adulate us! Keep an eye on our facebook as we’ll update on there where we’re dancing and there will inevitably be a change of plan at around 7.49pm.
See you there!!
An unusual Friday evening gig for us - come and revel in the revelry at the annual Lapford Revel!
Hosted by Lyme Morris, this seafront shindig with its panoramic views over the Jurassic Coast has all the makings of an amazing day out!
We love being us. We get to dance to the darkest dirtiest trad music, hang out with amazing morris sides, and we get to do it at The Rugglestone Inn, one of the best pubs on the moor, and definitely the one with the most ducks. I know I'm coming for dinner first so if you want the deep fried cheese wedges you'd better come early.
We were honoured to be asked to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the amazing Sidmouth Folk Festival, you’ll find us dancing our boots off all week long.
Amazing festival in Escot Park. We're dancing all 3 days all over the place by day, and launching ourselves into the festival by night. Not to be missed!
Worra wonderful spot this is, let’s hope the weather holds out for a hearty warm up for the long weekend!
Don’t miss this glorious Dartmoor fair with everything you could want - food, drink, stalls, local crafts, dog trials, livestock and stuff, and black-clad Dartmoor creatures emerging out of the rocks and lichen to dance and shriek at you and then disappear again. All the good things.
Performance times:
5:30 - 6pm
8:30 - 9pm
Beltane do Beltain in style!
Off we trot to Hampshire to welcome in the summer with live folk music, reenactor battles, local craftsfolk, and the burning of a 40ft wickerman.
Beltane at Beltane, the one and only. We will be here before sunrise to make sure it does, indeed, rise. You’re welcome.
Come and join us at the car park immediately below Hay Tor. You won’t miss us.
We’re thrilled to be part of the Green Man festival in Bovey Tracey this year. Traditional music, dance and folk stuff throughout town, and of course the making and unveiling of the Green Man. Come and watch us perform alongside other dance and music sides and groups.
Beltane Border will be dancing the Stoke Gabriel Wassail!
TIMES TBC (possibly 5.15pm and 7pm).
Stoke Gabriel with its apple orchards takes part in an ancient Wassail and mid-winter folk community festival. There will be singing and gun fire, offerings to the Spirit of the Trees and music, food and a lantern parade. And of course MORRIS..... that's where we come in! Loudly.
The festivities take place in the surroundings of Church Walk in the heart of the village and the Wassailceremony will take place in the community orchard.
Tickets: 4 GBP.
Friends of Stoke Gabriel School (FOSS), a charity, organises event with a BBQ. Local food and drink suppliers will be providing refreshments including Hunts Cider.
Saturday January 13th, we will be celebrating and leading the Lustleigh wassail. There will be cider; kids being forced into trees; perfectly good toasted bread stuck on branches; wassailing words; probably a lot of noise; singing and maybe even CAKE!
Join us outside The Cleave Inn at 7:45 for our performance and then into the orchard for the blessing of the apple trees.
If you can't be at this Wassail, then you get another chance to see us perform as we will also be at the Stoke Gabriel Wassail on Sat. 20th January. Times TBC.
TIME TBC - Check back in here closer to the day!
Yes, it will be freezing. Our dancers’ legs will be seizing up in the delightfully predictable damp Devon winter cold. Our musicians’ strings and drum skins will be doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things in the frost and the hail. And yes, you’ll have just paid a reassuring £6 for a plastic cup of pre-mixed mulled “wine”, and have started to question some of your life choices.
….But then we’ll start to dance, and it will all make sense.
This is what the pagan/Christian/commercial hybrid monster that we call Christmas is all about. This is why you sat in Totnes traffic for an hour and then tried to park for another hour. You know I’m right. Just come.
(PS one year a nice man told us after watching us dance here that he had thought that morris dancing was naff until he saw us. If that doesn’t convince you, I don’t know what will).
Beltane has danced the dark Morris at the Dark Gathering many times, and here we are again. The Dark Gathering at Boscastle is a truly one of a kind event. On or close to Samhain or All Hallow’s eve, we dance and sing at the time that the veil between worlds as it its flimsiest.
This event became so popular over the years that crowd control has had to be introduced. If you wish to attend, please find the Dark Gathering website or facebook page for information, as it is likely that tickets will need to be purchased in advance - not from us - from the event organisers.
It’s a special occasion, and after a day of dance and song, there’s usually a great session in the pub afterwards; if they’ll have us, that is!
Please note - this year it takes place in Tintagel, NOT in Boscastle.
https://propercornwall.co.uk/events/the-dark-gathering-2023-all-hallows-in-tintagel/
https://thedarkgathering.co.uk/
For some inexplicable reason we hadn’t danced at Widecombe Fair until last year. And now we have, there’s no turning back. We love it, come rain or shine, and this year we will be back in force. Don’t miss this glorious Dartmoor fair with everything you could want - food, drink, stalls, local crafts, dog trials, livestock and stuff, and black-clad Dartmoor creatures emerging out of the rocks and lichen to dance and shriek at you and then disappear again. All the good things.
Times TBC!!
Your Beltane Blogger is uninspired at this moment in time to find a wry play-on-words to title this event. And why should they? Such an event should speak for itself. There’s a shanty festival going on in Teignmouth and we are privileged to accompany the occasion with some ferocious yet moving dance performances. And then we will probably all sing, thereby nicely complementing the overall shanty theme. Teignmouth, shanties, Beltane, what’s not to love. See you there.
PS we have currently no idea when or where we are playing, but will update closer to the time on Facebook x
PPS We’ve updated this now so that we are ONLY dancing on Saturday 9th.
>> NOT DANCING on Sunday 10th!!!
Lovely lovely Lighter, we meet again. A generous bit of tarmac bounded conveniently by a sheer drop into water on two sides and a fantastic pub on another, allowing our spectators to choose either to go for a drink or jump into the drink. Which will you choose? Come and see us in August and let’s find out!
We are delighted to be back at Shrewsbury after a long hiatus. A great town and a fabulous folk festival with a huge line-up. We can’t wait to dance here and make everyone super happy that we’re back at last! And a delightful strategically-located town for easy access to pretty much the whole of the UK. So there’s no excuses.
https://shrewsburyfolkfestival.co.uk/
We’ll post timings of our dance spots closer to the time on our Facebook page, probably the other socials too
Things Happen Here (formerly the New Lion Brewery) in Dartington serve some of the most delicious ales this fine county (and much further beyond) has to offer, and Beltane have partaken of more than a few (thousand) pints in their time, so now we are coming straight to the source. Come for some bold dancing and even bolder dancing at this fantastic community space.
We will be joined by the wonderful Newton Bushel.
We love a community pub, and the Cornwood Inn's community has excelled itself in this regard, saving a beloved Dartmoor pub from a sad fate. So we will be here to celebrate this amazing effort, and raise some high spirits for the unwitting residents of Cornwood! Come and join us and we'll guarantee you a great evening (small print.. not actually in a financial sense!).
It's been too long since we've come to the lovely Chagford, so here we come to summon some Dartmoor spirits, delight/intimidate the crowds and generally get in the way. Plenty of room for everyone, a fantastic pub to escape into and enough tea and scones available in town to satisfy the mother-in-law, so bring her along too.
You should all know our devotion to this amazing pub by now (and yours truly's equal devotion to the deep-fried cheese wedges). Come and have dinner in the beer garden and watch us caper maniacally on the slither of tarmac, while disrupting good honest folk just trying to drive home for goodness' sake.
We’re heading East! That is, just past Exeter. We don’t know what we’ll find in these far-flung wilds of Feniton, so our friends, the truly excellent Otter Morris will hold our hands and look after us (while they’re not dancing). Many of us will have to get our motorised transport devices upgraded to ensure they will work outside of Dartmoor, but we promise to try our hardest to get there to intimidate the locals with our stamping and shrieking. This will be a great evening to be sure, so come and join us.
A perennial favourite of Beltane’s, for too many reasons to count… But I’ll give it a go. 1) MASSIVE, almost flat car park, giving space for dancers AND the public.. pretty exciting. 2) Proper lovely welcoming pub 3) Great alcoholic beverages that come out of taps 4) Incredibly welcoming publicans. 5) Lovely village where at least some locals don’t mind us too much. Ok so that’s 5 reasons, so pretty countable, but you get my point! It’s great - you should come.
A lovely folk festival up in the Mendips. Most likely field-based. A possible first for Beltane so I shan’t regale you with tales of our antics in years past. Time for us to have new shenanigans. And dance and sing and intimidate small children.
We’ll post timings of our dance spots closer to the time on our Facebook page, probably the other socials too
We are no strangers at the Bay, and have been made welcome here countless times by Kathy; fed and watered, well, beered, more accurately. An excellent selection of ales and ciders awaits you, and a lovely beer garden, at the top of town. But don’t even think of nicking the last car parking space in the car park opposite or our band will go on strike! Just saying..
Also, bring ear plugs as the sing-song in the pub afterwards is usually pretty deafening. In a nice way.
An absolutely massive Morris festival in the stunning Vale of Evesham. We were here a few years ago and absolutely smashed it, though we say so ourselves. It was hot and sweaty and our bus didn’t have aircon and we didn’t eat a vegetable for 48 hours, but we danced like dervishes and stormed the main square, and at some point took a dip in a gross municipal fountain when we popped into Stratford. We can’t promise we’ll do the latter, but we will bring ourselves and our renowned charisma to the streets of Evesham. Come see us.
https://nationalmorrisweekend.co.uk/
We’ll post timings of our dance spots closer to the time on our Facebook page, probably the other socials too
The lack of whimsy in the title for this particular evening spectacle is extremely intentional! At least a few of us Beltaners (including yours truly) has turned up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to A Church House Inn in the greater Devon area, only to be flummoxed at the lack of their corvid brethren making a menace of themselves. And especially as the Church House Inn at Stokeinteignhead is such a lovely pub, you really don’t want to not be there! Come and see us dance over a drink and dinner, and we’ll see you in the pub afterwards.
We will be joined by the wonderful Dartington Morris
Your Beltane Blogger has just noticed that the pub performance Bag-person is trying to cause chaos and confusion in the universe, by doing two successive pub outs in two weeks at TWO CHURCH HOUSE INNs! (Both of them equally wonderful, btw). What foul intention could this be - to send us to the wrong one on the wrong day, or just make our heads explode so we don’t come to either?!
But do not allow this wicked Baggins to confuse or distract you! Stay strong. Beat them at their own game, and come to both!! This Thursday, it’s The Church House Inn in Holne who are gracefully letting us trample their tarmac, and next week (on Friday) it’s their namesake in Stokeinteignhead.
With your help, we can be victorious. See you there!
From some kind of official website:
Lamb Ale is the name given to an unusual yearly festival celebrated in the village of Kirtlington that dates back to the early 17th century.
Lamb Ale comes from the same school of religious feasts as Whitsun Ale, which was celebrated across the country on Whit Sunday, the seventh Sunday after Easter. At these events ale would be brewed and sold for the benefit of the local church and the parish as a whole.
The Lamb Ale at Kirtlington, on the other hand, was a far more elaborate affair that lasted for a full week of feasting, drinking, and dancing.
… which is why we are going. Even though it’s not a full week.
Your Bashful Beltane Blogger is ashamed to say they have not yet been to The Teign House Inn in Christow and therefore has no first-hand experience to wax lyrical about the delights thereof. However, it looks wonderful, and Christow is a beautiful village, and the car park looks absolutely splendid to dance on, so one is very excited to be going! We hope to see you there.
We’re delighted to be invited by the wonderful Two Bridges Hotel to come and dance on their most resplendent of forecourts this May. We haven’t bothered their hotel or pub guests for quite some time, so it’s great to be back! An absolutely magical spot in the middle of the best bit of the moor. Come and join us for a drink, a dance (actually please don’t dance - that’s our job.. well, not exactly a job, more of a habit, really), and a singsong.
We’ll be joined on this hopefully sunny evening by Dartmoor Border Morris
This may (hopefully not!) be our last time at one of our absolutest favouritest pubs of all time - the White Thorn Inn in Shaugh Prior. This is not one to be missed! Great beers and food, some EXTREMEly loud after-dance singing in the pub (my eardrums took a few days to recover last time) and let’s not forget the huge and deliciously flat bit of road we dance on just outside the pub. Ps if you plan on driving through Shaugh Prior that evening - forget it right now.
We’ll be joined for the evening by Dartmoor AND Lodestone Morris!
Check out our double Cross Tree performance from the White Thorn last year!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0FDn-QvIQc
We love Upton Folk Festival! We haven’t been there for what seems like ages so we are hauling ourselves into cramped cars and joining in with the festivities for a few days. It’s a lovely town and fabulous festival with lots of excellent musicians and dancers. We’ll find out our schedule closer to the time, so you can too - by looking at the dedicated website: https://uptonfolk.org/dance/
We might also post some updates on social media so keep an eye out there.
Oh yes - May Morning! Beltane! We will be dancing up the sun NOT at Haytor this year as we’ll be up country. Probably Upton or Worcester Beacon.. check back for updates.
As proud members of the Joint Morris Organisation, Beltane are hosting the annual Day of Dance 2023 in Exeter! Postponed thanks to COVID, it is finally going ahead and we want you there! The streets of Exeter will be thronged with Morris sides from all over the country, of every style and creed. This is a fantastic opportunity to see and enjoy the huge variety of folk dancing and music out there in the UK. And no doubt we will take the opportunity to peacock ourselves around stealing all the glory.. you know us.
Come and enjoy a fantastic day - Saturday 22nd April from 10am to 5pm.
Locations throughout Exeter - check for details below….
It's such a BIG DEAL that there’s even a dedicated website for it here -
https://jmodayofdance.com/
A summer Morris side… us?? You can barely move this winter without seeing us leaping and screaming through the frigid cold somewhere in Devon. The excellent folk at Exeter University are running this year’s Inter-Varsity Folk Dance Festival Day of Dance this year (try saying that 10x fast) at the beautiful Exeter Quayside. Who were we to resist the siren call of throngs of crowds, adoring fans, and leagues of morris and folk dancers doing what we do best…. drinking! I mean, dancing! If that’s the sort of thing appeals to you, come and join us there. The festival is taking part February 3rd-5th, but we will be there only on Saturday 4th. We’ll be dancing at various times between 10am and 4pm. Got that? Excellent. For exact timing
This Saturday, January 14th, we will be celebrating and leading the Lustleigh wassail. There will be cider; kids being forced into trees; perfectly good toasted bread stuck on branches; wassailing words; probably a lot of noise; singing and maybe even CAKE!
Join us outside The Cleave at 7:45 for our performance and then into the orchard for the blessing of the apple trees.
