The Haud Almanack: June Events

June is supposed to be a quiet month for old customs. The May lot have packed away their hobby horses, and the harvest ones are still weeks off. And yet there are three things happening this month that I would happily cross the country for, all of them kept alive by people who decided a tradition was worth the trouble.

BAWMING THE THORN

Appleton Thorn, Cheshire. Saturday 20 June.

In the middle of the Cheshire village of Appleton Thorn there is a hawthorn tree, and once a year the children of the village dress it. They call it bawming, from an old word that means simply to adorn, and they do it properly: ribbons, flags and flowers wound round the branches until the tree is more colour than leaf. Then they join hands and dance around it, and sing the Bawming Song, which has been sung on that spot for longer than anyone can quite account for.

The tree is said to be descended from the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury, the one that supposedly flowered from Joseph of Arimathea's staff. You can take that or leave it. What is not in doubt is that a thorn has stood at Appleton for centuries, and that the village has been dressing it, on and off, since at least the 1800s. The custom lapsed more than once. Each time, someone brought it back.

What I love about Bawming is how small it is. There is no committee selling tickets to a spectacle. There is a tree, a song, and a few dozen children making something beautiful that will be gone by the following week. That impulse, to adorn a thing by hand for a single day because the day deserves it, is the same one behind half the pieces on The Haud. A thing does not have to last to be worth making.

SELKIRK COMMON RIDING

Selkirk, Scottish Borders. Friday 12 June.

While Cheshire dresses its thorn, the Borders are on horseback. The common ridings are the great summer ceremony of the border towns, and Selkirk's is the largest mounted gathering of them all: hundreds of riders following the burgh standard out around the old boundaries of the common land. It began as a yearly check that no neighbour had shifted the markers, and became something closer to a vow.

Selkirk's riding carries a particular grief. The Casting of the Colours remembers Flodden, in 1513, when the town sent eighty men to the battle and one came home, carrying a captured English flag because he could not find the words. The standard is still cast in the marketplace each year in his memory. If you only know the ridings as a grand day out, that moment will put you right. Hawick opened the Borders season on 5 June; Selkirk follows the week after.

GOLOWAN AND MAZEY DAY

Penzance, Cornwall. Festival 19 to 28 June, Mazey Day on Saturday the 27th.

Cornwall keeps midsummer better than anywhere. Golowan, the Cornish word for the feast of St John, fills Penzance for ten days and ends with Mazey Day, when the town centre closes to traffic and gives itself over to serpent dances, bands and fire. Watch for Penglaz, the Cornish 'Obby 'Oss: a horse's skull on a pole that snaps at the crowd and is, frankly, one of the more alarming things you can meet on a Saturday in June. The whole festival was revived in 1991, after the old midsummer had all but gone out. It is now one of the largest in the West Country, a fair reward for the trouble of bringing it back.

I will be in Cheshire for the thorn. If you make it to any of these, write and tell me what you saw.

Rosie