FORTEAN TRAVELLER
Beltane at Butser Ancient Farm
It’s early on a mild spring evening when the drums begin. A procession leaves the wattle and thatch huts, dressed in horns, tatters and face paint. While the May Queen and Green Man dance, the drummers line up beside a towering wooden figure. The fire is kindled and the wicker giant bursts into flame. This isn’t Summerisle or the Black Rock Desert, it’s Hampshire. Just off the A3.
No one knows exactly when the Beltane festival began at Butser Ancient Farm – not even the people who run the place. All they can say, based on old photographs, is that it has definitely been going on for more than 30 years. It started out as a small celebration for a group of people taking part in a remarkable archæological experiment, but in recent years it has grown into a flamboyant public festival attracting up to 2,500 people.
The 2020 event was cancelled due to Covid 19, but this year the Butser team came up with an alternative. A 25ft (7.6m) tall figure was built, burned and filmed as a virtual sacrifice to welcome in the summer and help launch their brand-new website, Butser Plus.
Rachel Bingham, the Creative Developer at Butser Ancient Farm, explains: “Historically, the idea of a wicker man is quite tenuous. There’s a reference to it in Cæsar’s Gallic Wars but whether it’s connected to Beltane… well, it’s kind of creative license and we think of it just as a celebration. We couldn’t go two years without celebrating it, even though we can’t have many people here in person.
“The idea is to film the burning of the wicker man alongside some of the other key activities of Beltane, like the storytellers and the drummers, and weave it into a piece of content that will go on the new online platform that we’re developing to share and support our work. It’s a way to help the farm keep going in these strange times and to share the experience of the wicker man with people wherever they might be.”
Butser Ancient Farm began in the early 1970s as an openair laboratory created by the Council For British Archæology to test theories about life in the Iron Age. Experimental archæology was still quite a radical concept back then, and under its first Director, Peter Reynolds, the Butser project led the way in new discoveries about farming, food and above all, house-building. You might recognise it as a filming location for the TV shows Horrible Histories and Britannia. Doctor Who fans of a certain age may even recall Joan Simms as a futuristic Boudicca, leading her tribe into battle from an early Butser roundhouse.
In normal times Butser holds courses in everything from flint-knapping to ancient music, for schoolchildren, students and anyone who just wants to find out more about how our ancestors did stuff. Most of the year, a steady trickle of visitors
gently time-travel between the Anglo Saxon, Roman, Iron Age and Neolithic areas, soaking up the history; but like many independent organisations, Butser has been hit hard by the pandemic. “It’s the weirdest feeling – you have a thriving site that has thousands of people visiting every year, and 35,000 schoolchildren, so to lose that almost overnight was scary,” says the farm’s Director Simon Jay.
“After getting over the initial shock, you start to fight back, to look at what we’re doing every day and think how we can change it and adapt. That’s how we came up with the idea of Butser Plus. When you go in, you can learn more about experimental archæology and learn more in depth about the weird and quirky things we end up doing. But there’s a wellbeing element too. The world at the moment is chaotic and full of anxiety and we know that a connection to our ancestors is hugely important. Really exploring the distant past can help people mentally as well.”
The team at Butser are also celebrating the completion of their newest ancient building – a reconstructed Neolithic longhouse based on an excavation at Horton in Berkshire. This is one of the larger structures on the site, about 15 by 7.5m (50 by 25ft), with wattle-and-daub walls and a reed-thatched roof sloping to the ground. The “windows” are made of stretched skins and inside, low benches surround a central hearth with cooking pots. In this atmospheric space, it’s easy to imagine you are back in the Stone Age, but is this really how our ancestors would have lived?
“I think it’s really important to acknowledge that this is just one interpretation,” says Site Archæologist Claire Walton. “We only had six post holes and some slot or foundation
“Exploring the distant past can help people mentally”
trenches, so there could be other interpretations that represent the footprint just as well; but for very practical reasons, this is the one that we chose. We have engineered it from the ground up.
“The first thing is that the roof has to be a certain pitch, it’s made of natural materials, so it has to be at least 45 degrees or the thatch will rot. If you put that pitch on top of a building with walls then you’re looking at a really giant building using lots of materials. So I thought ‘Hang on, if I just removed the walls and I put a roof on the ground, does that still fit with the archæological footprint?’ And the answer is yes it does. It actually creates an incredibly strong structure. This was genuinely an experiment because we didn’t know how easy it would be. This footprint was unique and no one else has tried experimenting with it.”
The Horton house was built by staff and volunteers from Butser along with members of the original excavation team from Wessex Archæology. The skills the team learn from making and using the building will help them interpret future excavations.
“It shines light into the corners,” says Claire. “The past is quite magical and being inside a building like this gives people a way to connect with it.”
As the wicker man blazes up into the darkening sky, it’s easy to feel some of that magic. It might not be historic, but listening to pagan-inspired
percussionists The Pentacle Drummers pounding out their potent rhythms at the feet of the blazing giant certainly fires the imagination and makes the heart beat faster. In other years, the event brings together an eclectic mix of re-enactors, families and curious people (in every sense of the word). It seems that one of Butser Ancient Farm’s most important archæological experiments has taken place without really being planned. They’ve made more than just houses and tools – they’ve created a compelling and unifying community ritual.
You can see videos of the burning man and of the Horton House at www.butserplus.com or find out more about the farm at www. butserancientfarm.co.uk.
2 LISA GLEDHILL is a film-maker, writer and occasional eclectic Pagan with a long-standing interest in forteana. She is a regular contributor to FT.
Beltane is an old Gælic festival, usually celebrated on 1 May, about half way between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. It is one of the four most significant festivals for many Wiccans and other modern Pagans, along with Lughnassadh, Samhain and Imbolc. The festival marks the beginning of summer and fire plays a significant part in the celebrations. In Gælic regions of the British Isles, traditions of driving livestock through or between fires to protect and purify them seem to have existed at least until the 18th century. The name itself might derive from protoCeltic words meaning ‘bright fire’. Well-dressings, making flower garlands and maypole dances are also traditionally associated with the beginning of May.
In popular culture of the 20th century, Beltane acquired sinister connotations mainly due to the works of Dennis Wheatley and other sensational writers who associated the festival with Satanism. The idea of combining May Day celebrations with a sacrificial burning figure of the kind described by Julius Cæsar seems to have first occurred in the 1973 film The Wicker Man (see FT381:36-43) Today, many secular communities and Pagan groups around the UK and English-speaking nations hold Beltane festivals. One of the most spectacular is the Beltane Fire Festival held each year on Calton Hill in Edinburgh.