The May Eve
There is a quality to the dusk this week, the light holding longer as May approaches. The verge grass is long and lush, soft and damp at the base where the sun has not yet reached. Swifts are expected any day – their absence still felt as a specific gap in the air above the village. Cattle are being moved to summer pastures, the shape of the fields shifting for the season. This week: Padstow drumming and the snap of a wooden jaw on May Day morning, the practical sprint of an English household at the turn of May, sweet cicely as the household sugar saver before sugar was cheap, and a field path walked into the dusk on the eve of the new month.
On the Horizon
The verge grass is long and lush, soft and damp at the base where the sun has not yet reached. Swifts are expected any day – their absence still felt as a specific gap in the air above the village. Cattle are being moved to summer pastures, the shape of the fields shifting for the season. Nettle tops must be gathered this week for soup before they go to seed; the window is closing. Beltane falls on May 1st: the old cross-quarter day marking the beginning of summer in the folk calendar, and welcoming the arrival of the warm season.
The Sky This Week
Sunrise 5.34am · Sunset 8.23pm
Moon Full Flower Moon on Friday 1 May at 18.23 BST – by coincidence, exactly on Beltane.
Harwich tides Low 5.26am · High 11.49am · Low 5.34pm.
Venus and Jupiter are both up in the western sky after sunset this week, and you can hold both in one glance. Venus is the brighter of the two, lower in the west-north-west and just upper-right of Aldebaran in Taurus; Jupiter sits about forty degrees higher, near Castor and Pollux in Gemini. They will both have set by about eleven. The Eta Aquariids – debris from Halley's comet – are active through the next fortnight and peak around 6 May, best seen in the small hours of the morning looking east, though the near-full moon will wash out all but the brightest. A single bright streak before dawn is worth standing in the cold for.
Sunrise/sunset: timeanddate.com, Baldock · Moon phases: Royal Observatory Greenwich · Tides: UKHO EasyTide · Eta Aquariids: Royal Astronomical Society
The Curious Instance of the Padstow 'Obby 'Oss
If you find yourself in North Cornwall as April turns to May, the 'Obby 'Oss is one of the most visceral spectacles in the British calendar. The festival revolves around two rival Horses – the Old 'Oss and the Blue Ribbon 'Oss. Each is a massive black-sailed hoop, nearly two metres wide, worn by a dancer who must navigate the town's narrow medieval streets while swirling and snapping a wooden jaw at the crowd. Accompanying each 'Oss is a Teazer, who dances ahead with a decorated club, coaxing the beast forward. The air is thick with the scent of beer and crushed cowslips, and the entire town is draped in birch and sycamore branches.
The May Song is played on a loop by a company of accordionists and drummers, acting as a metronome for the day. There is a specific moment in the tune where the music slows, the 'Oss bows low to the ground in a symbolic death, and then surges forward as the tempo lifts again. The cycle of rebirth is the whole point – out with the winter, in with the summer – and it reads plainly even if you are standing in it for the first time.
While thousands of visitors descend on the town, this is not a show put on for outsiders. It is a local homecoming. Many Padstonians return from across the globe to follow the 'Oss. The atmosphere is one of intense community pride, and from the early morning carols at the Golden Lion Inn to the final putting to bed of the horses at nightfall, the energy rarely dips. If you are planning a trip, the traditional dress code is white with either red or blue ribbons depending on which 'Oss you have chosen to follow. Stay mobile – the 'Osses move with surprising speed through the dense crowds.
Sources: Padstow 'Obby 'Oss official site · Ronald Hutton, Stations of the Sun (1996)
The Hearth
The May Eve Kitchen
By the first of May, a properly managed English household was moving at a sprint. This was not a response to any pagan calendar but to a shift in what the land was actually doing. The signal was the hawthorn. When those white blossoms opened, it meant the growing season had turned a corner, and if you were not paying attention, the best of the spring harvest would be gone before you had found your garden gloves.
Nettles were the immediate priority. There is a very specific, fleeting window, right at the end of April, to pinch off the top four leaves of a nettle plant before it starts to flower. Wait too long and the leaves turn coarse, the iron content fades, and you are left with something stringy and bitter. Making nettle soup on May Eve was not about tradition for tradition's sake – it was simply the last moment the plant was actually worth eating. People had been tossing these greens into pots long before anyone felt the need to record the recipe.
While the nettles went to the kitchen, the hawthorn flowers headed for the still-room. Since elderflowers had not arrived yet, the may blossom was the primary resource for the house's tonics. The flowers were distilled into a skin wash or preserved in sugar to last the summer. The scent is that strange, heavy mix of honey and trimethylamine – our ancestors recognised it as the scent of decay, but they were not going to let a little olfactory grimness stop them from making a useful tincture.
In the Scottish Highlands into the 1840s, and in parts of Ireland within living memory, cattle were driven between two Beltane fires on the eve of May to be protected from disease, accident, and the evil eye for the coming year. The two fires represented the threshold the herd crossed into summer; the custom faded in Britain by the middle of the nineteenth century and survived longest in the Gaelic-speaking regions. It sat alongside the hawthorn tonics and the nettle pot as part of the same practical effort to get everyone and everything over the line into the warm half of the year in reasonable order.
Everything moved quickly. Within a fortnight, the hawthorn would be finished. Even the hop shoots, which folks in Kent used as a stand-in for asparagus, served boiled and buttered, were already reaching their limit by the time the may blossom was in full swing. If you missed that window, that was it.
Beltane fires: Wikipedia · Hawthorn: Woodland Trust · Nettles and hop shoots: Dorothy Hartley, Food in England (1954)
The Garden Plot
Weather Watch
A warm and largely settled week, by the look of it, after a cooler start. Daytime highs lifting through the high teens by Wednesday and reaching twenty or twenty-one on Thursday, with sunny intervals and a moderate breeze. Friday – the first of May – turns warm and humid, with a weak front sweeping in from the south-west, bringing rain and the chance of a thundery shower. The Bank Holiday weekend turns more changeable, with showers in the north and brighter intervals further south. Worth getting your sowing and your evening walks in before the front arrives.
For the Longer Game
A warm and largely settled week, by the look of it, after a cooler start. Daytime highs lifting through the high teens by Wednesday and reaching twenty or twenty-one on Thursday, with sunny intervals and a moderate breeze. Friday – the first of May – turns warm and humid, with a weak front sweeping in from the south-west, bringing rain and the chance of a thundery shower. The Bank Holiday weekend turns more changeable, with showers in the north and brighter intervals further south. Worth getting your sowing and your evening walks in before the front arrives.
Right Now
Nettle tops are at their best right now: the top four leaves of young plants, bright green and full of iron. Wear gloves, gather a carrier bag full, and cook them exactly as you would spinach – they lose their sting the moment heat touches them. A bowl of nettle soup on May Eve is one of the older ways of marking the season. The Larder this week takes a different spring find – alexanders from the coastal lane and chalk verge – but the impulse is the same.
Maintenance
Go over the kitchen garden beds with a fork before the planting season begins in earnest. Break up any compaction left by winter rain, lift the remaining weeds out by the root, and rake to a fine tilth. Twenty minutes of this now saves frustration every time you try to sow or plant something over the next three months.
The Larder
Alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum) was once in every Lenten kitchen in England, and is now barely known. A tall, umbellifer-like plant with glossy dark green leaves and yellow-green flower heads, it grows along coastal lanes and on chalk, and the young stems taste somewhere between celery, parsley, and asparagus. In her Vegetable Book of 1978, Jane Grigson records fresh goat cheese as the creamy counterpart to those sharp aromatic stems and the bright acid of young forced rhubarb. Pot-herbs gathered from hedges and verges in a Lenten diet needed something soft and fatty to balance the bitter edge of the greens, and fresh goat cheese was what smallholders and crofters had to hand. The pairing is older than the kitchen books that record it; Grigson is documenting a habit, not inventing one.
Alexanders Scones
Ingredients
- A small bunch of young alexanders — shoots and lower leaves, finely chopped
- 500g potatoes, peeled
- 50g butter
- 100g plain flour
- A small block of mature cheddar, cut into eight cubes
- Sea salt and black pepper
Method
- Peel the potatoes and boil them in well-salted water until tender. Drain and leave to steam dry in the colander for five minutes — this matters; wet mash will make the dough sticky.
- While the potatoes steam, wash and dry the alexanders, then chop the shoots and lower leaves finely.
- Mash the warm potatoes with the butter until smooth.
- Fold the chopped alexanders through the mash, then work in the flour a little at a time until you have a soft dough. Season with sea salt and a turn of black pepper.
- Divide the dough into eight equal balls. Push a cube of cheddar into the centre of each, pinch the dough closed over the top, and flatten gently into a round patty.
- Shallow fry in a little butter or oil over a medium heat, three or four minutes a side, until golden brown and crisp at the edges. Eat warm, while the cheese is still molten.
If alexanders aren't to hand, the same logic works with wild garlic leaves, chopped chives, or the green tops of spring onions — anything sharp and green from the verge or the garden, finely chopped and folded through the mash before the flour goes in.
If you find yourself with more than you can use in a week, the old preservation method is simple salt. Salt the curds lightly, press them into small rounds in muslin to drain overnight, and keep them cold. Pressed and salted, they will last several weeks longer than the fresh cheese would have done and develop a little more character in the process.
Species: Plantlife
The Still-Room
Sweet Cicely
While the alexanders belongs to the coastal lane and chalk verge, sweet cicely – Myrrhis odorata – is one of the first real greens of the year in a garden and one of the most forgotten. It comes up early on the north side of a wall, fern-like in leaf with flat heads of small white flowers by the end of April, and everything on it, from leaf to green seed to root, tastes of aniseed. In kitchens before sugar was cheap, cicely was the household sweetener for anything sharp. A handful in the pan with rhubarb, gooseberries, or plums cut the sourness by half, which is why you will still find it called sugar saver in older herbals and why Victorian cottage gardens kept a plant or two by the kitchen door.
The still-room use was gentler. Culpeper, in 1653, recommended sweet cicely water as a tonic for a weak stomach and a drink for convalescents. The aniseed scent clears the head; the plant itself is about as safe as any wild green in Britain. You just have to be certain you know it, because three or four of its umbellifer relatives on the verge are not safe at all, and hemlock in particular grows in the same ditches.
Sweet Cicely Cordial
after the old still-room practice
Ingredients
- A good handful of young sweet cicely leaves — fern-like, soft, bright green, with a clear aniseed smell when crushed
- 300g leaf to 600ml cold spring water
- 200g caster sugar
- Juice of one lemon
Method
- Wash the leaves gently and pat dry.
- Put the leaves, water, and sugar into a pan. Bring slowly to the gentlest possible simmer — steam but not boiling — for twenty minutes.
- Turn the heat off and leave to cool with the lid on.
- Strain through muslin into a clean glass bottle. Add the lemon juice and keep cold.
- Use within a week.
A splash in sparkling water makes the cleanest, most unexpected May drink. A spoonful stirred into stewed rhubarb replaces the sugar entirely. Be certain of your identification before gathering — hemlock grows in the same ditches and is not safe.
Cicely as still-room tonic: Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (1653) · Species reference: RHS
The Weekend Walk
The May Eve Boundary
If you want to mark the turn into May properly, take yourself out on an old field path on the evening of the 30th and walk its length before the light is entirely gone. Find the oldest footpath you can, start it while there is still light at nine o'clock, and let the walk carry you into dusk. The Beating of the Bounds was how rural communities kept shared knowledge of where their land ended, long before anyone trusted a printed map to do the job for them. Boys were bumped on boundary stones and dunked at stream crossings to make the geography unforgettable. The memory needed to last a lifetime, and a sore shin did the job better than a document.
The hedges are doing something unusual this week: the cow parsley and the hawthorn are in full flower at the same time, and that overlap only lasts a fortnight. As you walk, look for cow parsley along the field edges – the one with the hollow, ridged stem and finely divided leaves that smell faintly grassy when you bruise a leaf. Hemlock turns up looking similar at a glance, but its stem is blotched with purple and the crushed leaf is unpleasant in a way you only need to learn once. By the time you have walked the length of one field, the bats will be out, and the hollow-stemmed white flower at your shin is your clearest marker that the hedgerow has tipped into May.
Beating of the Bounds: Tradfolk · Cow parsley/hemlock ID: Plantlife
An Old Word for It
One old word, chosen for the week.
Mirk. The thick, settled darkness of deep country, the kind that only properly arrives where there are no streetlights to push back against it. Middle English in origin, still current in Scots and the dialects of Northumberland and Yorkshire. Useful this week as a word for what your garden becomes after dusk on May Eve, once the hedge at the end of it has gone quiet.
In Good Report
A piece of news worth passing on, from this week.
On 20 April, conservationists at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland released the 30,000th pine hoverfly into the Cairngorms National Park — more flies than there are people in the Cairngorms by a margin of nearly two to one. The pine hoverfly is one of Britain's rarest insects, critically endangered, and until 2022 had not been seen in adult form in the wild for nearly a decade. It depends on a very specific kind of woodland: mature Scots pine with rotten tree-stumps standing long enough to fill with rainwater, and a broadleaf understory with rowan in flower. Logging cleared the rot holes, and the hoverfly went with them.
The Rare Invertebrates in the Cairngorms partnership has been breeding the species at Highland Wildlife Park since 2018 and releasing larvae into artificial rot holes drilled into old stumps and filled with water, at sites managed by RSPB Scotland, Forestry and Land Scotland, and Anagach Woods Trust. This March's release of nearly seven thousand larvae brought the total past thirty thousand. Wild-bred individuals are now being recorded in new areas. A fly that was effectively gone is back in four forests in the Highlands, and the rowans this May will have visitors they have not had in a lifetime.
Pine hoverfly release: RSPB Scotland · Conservation breeding programme: Royal Zoological Society of Scotland
The Turning Wheel
1 May – Beltane — cross-quarter day, the height of spring.
1 May – Padstow 'Obby 'Oss — Cornwall's May Day ceremony.
4 May – May Day Bank Holiday.
8 May – Helston Flora Day — the furry dance through the streets of Helston.
Yours, until next Thursday.
Meg.
