Castleton Garland Day: The Garland King Rides Blind Through the Village
On the evening of 29 May, in the high valley between Mam Tor and Lose Hill in the Derbyshire Peak, a man on a horse rides through the village of Castleton invisible from the waist up. He is wearing the Garland: a beehive of flowers built around a wooden frame, three feet across and almost four feet tall, weighing nearly four stone. Two men lift it onto his shoulders before he mounts. The Garland King leads the procession through the village, can see only what is directly in front of his horse, and is steered by the band walking on either side.
The structure
The Garland is built each year from a wooden frame thatched with straw and covered with rows of flowers picked from village gardens that morning: hyacinths, wallflowers, forget-me-nots, tulips, rhododendrons, and laburnum. The flowers are arranged in horizontal bands around the frame, with the colours alternating up the cone. At the top sits a smaller posy called the Queen, a separate piece that is detached at one point in the procession and laid on the war memorial. Four men spend most of a day building the Garland. It is over by the next morning.
1749: the documented start
The Castleton Garland is one of the rare old customs we can actually date. The Castleton Churchwardens' Accounts for 1749 record a payment of eightpence "for an iron rod to hang ye ringers Garland in," and the following year three shillings for "ringers on 29th May." From 1749 onward the parish books carry annual entries for ringers, garland materials, and ale for the bearers. Earlier than 1749 is conjecture, but the entries from that year on are consistent and unbroken to within living memory.
The earlier theory
The leading theory for the origin of the Castleton Garland places it inside the church before it ever went outside. The floor of St Edmund's was unpaved until 1820 and was covered with rushes brought in for warmth, replaced annually in late spring. A decoration of greenery and flowers hung from the bell-ropes during the same period. When the floor was flagged in 1820 and the rushes stopped coming, the garland left the church and migrated onto a man's shoulders, taking the date of the old rush-bearing with it. By 1880 Alfred Burton was watching four men spend five hours a year building one. Rush-Bearing, his 1891 account, places the Castleton Garland firmly in this church-decoration tradition rather than the pagan one popular in Victorian folklore.
The procession route
The procession winds through the village with the brass band, stopping at each of the half-dozen pubs in turn. At the churchyard gates the Queen is detached from the top of the Garland and laid on the war memorial. The Garland King dismounts and the Garland is hauled up the tower of St Edmund's on a rope and impaled on one of the four corner pinnacles, where it stays until the flowers wilt. The custom has had its critics: some years ago a vicar, having decided the whole thing was pagan, climbed the tower and threw the Garland off the parapet. The village put it back up the same evening and it has been up every year since.
Where to see it
Castleton sits in the high valley below Mam Tor in the northern Peak District, fifteen miles west of Sheffield and eight miles north of Bakewell. The 29 May date is fixed: Oak Apple Day, the day of the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, and one of the surviving fragments of the old English ritual year. The procession leaves the centre of the village around six in the evening. The Castleton Historical Society confirms the timing each year. The brass band plays the Castleton Garland tune, a slow march written specifically for the occasion and unique to the village.
Sources: Castleton Churchwardens' Accounts, 1749–1750; Alfred Burton, Rush-Bearing (1891); Roy Judge, The Jack-in-the-Green (1979); Castleton Historical Society annual notices.