41 rituals of the turning year

and a wassail poem

With communal rhythms and rituals gone, and nothing to hold one in place, rooted, in some metaphorical sense one falls off the face of the earth.

Ritual was important to our ancestors. Rituals throughout the year, certainly until recently, were also significant in or to a farming life, where wellbeing was tied to the seasons and their activities in relation to producing and consuming food, and to the relationships in one’s community: reasons to get together, celebrate, make and share food and drink, make music, sing and dance, reinforce bonds, stave off the darkness. (There is a lot to say about this, but not here.)

Such ritual offers breathing space, meaning, a chance to reflect and relax, community. The farming life, if the aim is to feed oneself and one’s family or community by producing food to consume or sell, is in many ways a hard one with long working days in all weathers, and such food producers are under-appreciated in our deracinated culture. Everyone needs a chance to stop and unwind, and one or two of these ritual times remain in some form.

So I think of seasonal ritual as particularly pertinent to a rural life, but I wonder whether an urban life needs this recognition of the seasonal changes in the turning world at least as much? With such rhythms and rituals gone and nothing to hold one in place, rooted, in some metaphorical sense one falls off the face of the earth.

Samuel Palmer, The Magic Apple Tree

When I was an undergraduate, separated for the first time from my life in the North Devon countryside, my own little ritual was, as often as possible, to go and visit this little Samuel Palmer painting, above, in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Having discovered it there in my first term, that winter I’d arrive early and sit on the steps of the Fitzwilliam until it opened. Having a hit of this painting before lectures and tutorials sustained me more than I can possibly explain.

Ritual matters. Rituals of the turning year deepen our relationship to the earth, as well as our inner lives. On and off over many years now I have kept the wassailing date of January 17th, when the apple trees are traditionally woken up, blessed and thanked for their harvest, with a petitioning for a good one in the coming year. The ritual involves tucking a piece of toast soaked in cider into a fork of each tree.

In the 1990s I rented a shoemaking workshop at the National Trust’s Buckland Abbey near Tavistock in Devon. There, I instigated an annual Wassail. We sang the traditional songs, and processed round the orchard in the traditional way, with much noise of saucepans being banged together, shotguns being fired into the air to ‘see off evil spirits’, trees being hit hard with sticks to wake them up, and an offering of cider, either soaked in toast as above, or poured as a small libation on the roots of each tree. We then ate, drank and were merry.

You might have gathered, if you’ve been reading this for a while, that the great noise with shotguns, saucepans and shouting, and the banging of trees, is not my way. I see no need to wake them up into cold January. I prefer the gentler touch of hand and quiet voice acknowledging and blessing each tree, thanking it, and yes offering a libation of some description. I’m not averse to a cup of cider after the ritual, with apple flapjack or the like. I might request another good harvest: the old Bramley orchard in the picture above fruits prolifically in its tangled birds-nest twigginess. This last autumn we pressed 66 litres of the best apple juice ever from a single afternoon of gathering her windfall fruits – there is so much to do always on the land that that’s all we had time for. That has to change this year.

There is another little orchard here in the Home Meadow with dessert and cider apple trees, and as part of our embryonic forest garden we’ve planted a few more of the local varieties.

For many reasons, I haven’t been able to wassail this year, but I have visited each tree in the two old orchards, touched and thanked it, and clocked which ones are going to need a small haircut before they wake. They have been very much neglected for quite a while, and it’s difficult to know where to start with the pruning, but tending to the trees is a job I relish, even in the cold.

Some of you may have seen this poem, from Apple Month in my most recent book, the one about the new research into trees, and the mythology, history and cultural ecology of 13 trees traditionally sacred to the Celts. The poem was first posted here on Substack in post #10, where there is quite a lot on the magical apple tree.


Apple Tree

Wassail night has passed and winter’s
blue flames have retreated for now.
In the orchard, a thrush stabs the last
soft apple, and another calls from the tallest
tree. If you were to come by here, come
and stand by me here, I would hold
your palm to the trunk, tell you how to open
the eyes and ears of your hand so you
could feel how again the xylem and phloem
are waking, making their long slow
streaming journey between earth and star,
if you were to come here, to come by here again.

Roselle Angwin

You might be thinking ‘buses’! It’s true that I’ve a pent-up plethora of pending posts pushing at the periphery of my p-syche, after about 3 weeks without posting. Fear not – my week–to-ten-day rhythm will return soon. Thank you, as always, for reading: I love the fact that you do.