Spring in Cornwall Means the Furry Dance
Eccentric English Festival in Helston is Worth a Look
May 5, 2009
The Cornwall tradition is held on the 8th except when the 8th is a Sunday or Monday, in which case the dance is held the preceding Saturday. In 2009, May 8 falls on a Friday, so it will be on the 8th. While it isn’t a Bank Holiday, it is probably likely that hundreds, if not thousands, will take the day off from work and make a long weekend out of celebrating the Furry Dance. It's a great reason to visit England, unique in all the world
What, Exactly, Is the Furry Dance?
It is possible the name came from Flora, but what a change! Still, the dancers wear the local emblematic blossom, Lily of the Valley, while they dance. And they dance long and hard; basically all day long.
Local folk participate rather than professional dancers. The men dress in top hat and tails and the women in evening dresses and hats. Garden-party hats, not evening hats, just to make it all a bit more incongruous.
And then there’s the dance itself. The Helston Town Band plays the traditional tune, a version of Lord of the Dance appropriately enough. The dancers, paired up, process through town, up one side and down the other, mainly walking. However, at regular intervals, the men and women take hands and do a sort of do-si-do around each other, hopping up and down in the middle of it before proceeding onward. You can see a live example of it here. It is said that the dance is based on a pre-Celtic rite of spring.
Mummers' Play Followed by Lord of the Dance
The day of dance begins at about 7 a.m., with people milling about and some dancing. At 8:30, there’s a mummer’s play, the Hal-an-Tow, performed at several locations in the town simultaneously. As are all mummers’ plays, Hal-an-Tow is slightly Biblical, this one being a contest between St. George and St. Michael, with George slaying the usual dragon, and Michael his usual adversary, the devil.
After this, at 10 am, the Children’s Furry Dance begins. The adult version begins at noon. At 5 pm, a final Furry Dance procession winds down the main street.
Historic Helston, the Creation of Loe Pool, and the Saxon Invaders
It is also fitting that the Furry Dance, one of Britain’s oldest festivals, takes place in a very old town. Helston, only about six miles from the sea, was once a port but the estuary was blocked up in a storm in the 13th century, and it’s now an inland port with a huge freshwater lake, Loe Pool, behind the sand bar blocking access to the sea directly. The town is still an inland port, however, because it is served by the River Cober.
By the time of the blocking of its estuary, and the rerouting of the Cober, Helston was already ancient. It was probably formed as a town in the Dark Ages, and was later taken by invading Saxons in the sixth century. The Saxons added the ending “ton” to the original Cornish Celtic name, Hen lis (Old Court) and it came out, after a few permutations, as Helston.
English King John (Cornish people often still maintain they are not English) chartered Helston in 1201, right before it became landlocked. The royal charter afforded Helston the right to have its own court and assorted other royal privileges. Still, the Celtic flavor remained, with the insistence on carrying on a somewhat Christianized ancient Celtic festival well into the Computer Age, odd-looking dance steps and all.
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