This was the Stoke Gabriel Wassail, an annual event held in mid-January, in which the apple trees are blessed, in the hope of ensuring a bumper crop of fruit for fruit bowls, pies and cider - especially cider - in the coming year. Stoke Gabriel is a small village on the river Dart near Paignton in Devon, about as unspoiled as small villages get, without being preserved in aspic.
There's nothing preserved about the Wassail, although the festival goes back many hundred of years. Wassails like this used to be common in many villages in the South West, almost everywhere they relied on apples as part of the local economy. As one of the wassail singers, we have a repertoire of over a dozen songs, from villages in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall and up to the Gower in South Wales. Most of them promise good singing in exchange for cider, beer or gin and all are lively, flagon-swinging songs.
The Stoke Gabriel Wassail happens in the village's community orchard, it's equivalent of a village green, and has grown up into a real midwinter festival, with Morris dancers, a Mummer's play, folk music and a storyteller, the inimitable Clive Fairweather in his 19th year at the event. There are home-made pasties, beers, mulled cider and heady, local apple brandy.
We're primarily there for the Wassail itself, though. Usually three trees in the orchard are picked to receive the libations. The Wassail King and Wassail Queen, children from the village who have been elected to the roles, are sat up in the branches and the Master of Ceremonies, he of the breeches and tri-corner hat, hands slices of toast to them, soaked in last year's cider. Their majesties place the toast in the tree, while the MoC circles its roots with more cider, as if to remind it of what's required in the coming season.
When this is done, we sing:
Old apple tree we wassail thee
Here's hoping thou wilt bear
For the Lord doth know where we shall be
When comes another year;
For to bloom well and to bear well,
So happy let us be;
Let every man take off his cap
And shout out to the old apple tree
and then shout:
Old apple tree, we wassail thee
Here's hoping thou wilt bear
Hats full,
caps full,
three-bushel bags full
And little heaps under the stair!
Hip-hip-hooray
Hip-hip-hooray
Hip-hip-hooray
After the last hooray, the shotguns are fired in the air, to scare the evil spirits. The sparks from their barrels and the volume of the reports does it for me, and I've not seen an evil spirit in that orchard in all the times I've visited. Proof enough.
Perhaps the most important thing about the Wassail is that it feels so integral to the life of the village. I get no sense that it's being done to keep the tradition alive - though of course it does - but that it's one of the events that marks the turning of the year, in the same way the bale tossing does at the Flower Show in my own village or as countless other idiosyncratic activities do in other communities around the country. Without getting precious about anything, I feel privileged to take part in the Stoke Gabriel Wassail.
