Mission to rekindle ancient tales of the Dales

The website dedicated to one of Yorkshire’s most ancient traditions proudly proclaims the next burning will take place on August 25.

No-one is quite sure when or why the custom, held each year in West Witton on the nearest Saturday to St Bartholomew’s Day, started and the truth is no-one really cares. What does matter is that the tradition of the Burning of Old Bartle is upheld, so at exactly 9pm this Saturday a life-sized effigy of an anonymous man will once again be paraded along the main street while the villagers chant a doggerel about misfortune, horn blowing and ultimately a man losing his life in front of a baying crowd.

It takes around an hour for the effigy, stuffed with straw and with hair made from the fleece of a sheep, to reach its final destination in Grassgill Lane. Once there it’s set alight, as the gathered masses join in a round of songs celebrating life in the Yorkshire Dales. Given its echoes of the cult film The Wicker Man it wouldn’t be a surprise if the spirt of Edward Woodward was somehow summoned en route.

“There are various theories about when and where the custom originated,” says Nobby Dimon, founder of the Richmond-based North Country Theatre and a man who has recently embarked on a mission to revive various ancient Dales folklores. “One theory suggests it’s about a sheep thief and a re-enactment of how the villagers took the law into their own hands. It’s the kind of the theme which crops up all the time as you starting digging deeper into the customs of this part of the world.

“There’s another called Riding the Stag, where the guilty party, often someone accused of beating their wife, was carried around on a kind of mobile stocks, so the villagers could mete out their own rough justice.”

Nobby has form when it comes to staging large-scale community events, but his next – inspired by the area’s folklore – could well be his biggest yet. The seeds were sown while he was sat in the theatre company’s small offices above a chiropractors in Richmond, but it has since taken Nobby on a journey from the Dales market town to Norway.

“Richmond just so happens to be twinned with the Norwegian town of Vinstra,” he says. “Each year they stage the Per Gynt Festival which celebrates an ancient fairytale of a hunter chased out of his village for being a bit of a rogue. Over the course of the story he rescues various maidens, shoots a number of trolls and ultimately redeems himself.

“There is a definite Scandinavian zeitgeist at the moment what with the success of Wallander and The Killing on TV and having already built up a relationship with the organisers of the Per Gynt Festival I began to wonder whether there was equivalent Yorkshire folklore, which might give us the basis for our very own event.”

Starting with a blank canvas, Nobby put a call out for stories among those whose families have been in the area for as long as anyone can remember and went back to the theatre’s own archives seeking inspiration. It was there that he rediscovered the dialect poem Reeth Bartle Fair.

“I’d read it a long time ago, but as soon as I came across it again it felt like I had struck gold,” he says. “Written in Yorkshire dialect, the poem dates from the 1860s and tells the story of a Swaledale lead miner going to the Bartholomew Fair. On the way he sees his wife dancing with another man and is so upset he goes off to another pub where he drowns his sorrow in gin. After that he’s not really sure what happens, but when his memory kicks in again, his clothes are all torn and it would seem that he has been in some sort of fight.

“Bartle is short for Bartholomew so I started to wonder whether I might be able to combine these two ancient stories.

“I thought perhaps this drunken man might somehow stumble into the Burning of Bartle ritual and end up being the figure who is being abused. It would obviously have been a bit of a long walk from Swaledale to Wensleydale, but there are also tales about tunnels which connected the lead mines across the two Dales.

“There is the old saying that there are only seven stories in the world. When you start reading ancient myths and legends, which seem to share so many similarities, you begin to realise just how true that is.”

The final performance, which Nobby hopes will be part Alice in Wonderland, part Grimms’ fairytale, won’t take place until next summer, but before then there is much to do.

Nobby has already held a number of workshops in an effort to assemble the large cast and crew needed to stage the event and this weekend’s Burning of Bartle ceremony might just encourage a few more on board.

“North Country Theatre is a touring company, but we are very aware our base is here in Richmond and these large scale productions are our way of keeping in touch with our community,” he says. “It’s six years since we did one of these big plays. It was a real success and ever since people have been asking when are we going to do it again.”

Set in 1953, The Last Dance of a Dalesman was also steeped in Dales history and told the story of a tin miner and his deathbed request that his body, like hundreds of others before him, be carried the 15 miles to the nearest consecrated ground.

That show back in 2005 was brought to the stage with the help of 50 volunteers and four professional actors. So far 75 people, aged between eight and 70, have already signed up to Nobby’s latest project.

“We always get a few people who have never acted before and for them to be able to work side by side with professional actors is a fantastic opportunity,” he says. “The performance itself is important, but actually the main thing for us is that it connects people living in often isolated spots from Reeth to Leyburn. It’s about creating a sense of community.”

Having just returned from seeing Norway’s Per Gynt festival first hand, Nobby hopes to have his own script finished by Christmas. Rehearsals are due to begin in January and should he realise his dream of a Per Gynt for the Dales it will be testament to a company which recently suffered a massive cut to its funding.

“We used to get £38,000 a year from the Arts Council, which represented about a third of the company’s turnover. Now we get nothing,” says Nobby. “We’re just thankful that we weren’t also dependent on local authority funding. When the Arts Council made their decision, we didn’t have anything left to lose.

“The theatre has always been really well supported by the local community and in many ways this project is about us giving something back to them.”

North Country Theatre is keen to hear from anyone who would like to take part in the Per Gynt for the Dales project and for more details call 01748 825288.

A Saint’s statue or the giant pig farming son of Thor – who was Bartle?

Social historian Henry Buckton has just completed a book on Britain’s ancient rural traditions.

Yesterday’s Country Customs looks at the origins of various rituals, including the Burning of Bartle.

“Like many of these customs there are various theories regarding its origin,” says Henry. “One dates it to the Reformation when agents of King Henry VIII sought to confiscate any religious paraphernalia they deemed to be ungodly. St Bartholomew’s in West Witton is said to have housed a wooden statue of the saint after which the church was named and in order to prevent it being seized the villagers hid it in several different locations before finally losing it at Grassgill.

“However, there is another account which claims Bartle was a giant and the mortal son of the Viking god Thor. For some unexplained reason he took up pig-farming in the West Witton area and things went well until the day he discovered that his prized boar was missing.”

In ancient times it seems nothing was allowed to come between a giant and his pigs and believing one of the villagers to be guilty of the crime, a violent feud began.

“The story goes that the locals lay siege to his castle, setting it on fire and killing the giant inside.”

Yesterday’s Country Customs by Henry Buckton is published by the History Press priced £12.99. To order call the Yorkshire Post Bookshop on 01748 8211122.