FEATURE Our Heritage
n By Keith Hatch Wassailing in Whimple
Locate your nearest orchard, pour some cider, channel your inner Wurzel and get ready to Wassail
“A wassail a wassail, the moon she shines down Our apples are ripe and our nuts they are brown
For when you shall bud dear old apple tree
And when you shall bear we’ll sing unto thee.”
So rang out the song across Whimple’s streets and orchards on Old Twelfth Night as villagers and visitors attended the annual wassail.
Arriving at Whimple on a freezing cold January night, you can feel the buzz as a large crowd gathers in the car park of the New Fountain Inn around a solitary apple tree – The Whimple Wonder.
Song sheets are circulated and mulled cider distributed before people come together to sing to the tree to encourage a good harvest.
Two local children then place cider soaked toast on the tree and shotguns are fired to scare away any evil spirits that might lurk in its branches.
The noisy crowd, led by local folk musicians and banging pots and pans as they go, then proceeds through the village, stopping at two more orchards to warm by bonfires, drink more cider and wassail more apple trees.
Wassailing is a tradition going back across the centuries in Britain, particularly in counties with large numbers of orchards, such as Somerset, Dorset and Devon. The tradition has seen growing interest in recent years, and not just in rural villages like Whimple.
Rumour has it they even Wassail down in Bristol, paying “homage to the city’s abandoned orchards, gnarly park trees and super strength cider-drinkers!”
According to the Whimple Heritage Centre no one knows exactly when the
Whimple Wassail started, but an article in 1791 mentioned the ritual in Devon, reporting “the custom with the Devonshire people to after supper go into the orchard with large quantities of cider, having roasted apples pressed into it.”
Whimple is surrounded by orchards, and a good harvest was vital to the local economy, so wassailing was fully encouraged. The Whimple Wassail was first mentioned by Victorian
folklorist Reverend Sabine Baring- Gould in his 1908 book Devon Characters and Strange Events.
The tradition stopped during the
second world war, but in 1993 John Shepard and the Whimple History
Society revived it, and it has been growing in popularity ever since. The local wassail song was even
recorded by folk musician Jim Causley, who leads the crowd around the village and orchards, and on to a welcome and warming “Wassail supper” at the villages Cricket Club, where he was joined by other musicians for impromptu folk session.
And on a bitterly cold and dark winter night, being warm, surrounded by friendly locals listening to traditional music and drinking local cider you can understand why the popularity of the wassail continues to grow.
29 uniteLANDWORKER Spring 2024
Keith Hatch
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