The Grasmere Rushbearing

A walker on his way from Skipton to Keswick reached Grasmere on Saturday 21 July 1827 and found the villagers strewing the church floor with fresh rushes; the old clerk told him that by annual custom the rushbearing procession would be that evening. The children, mostly girls, made garlands of the valley’s wild flowers and carried them through the village behind the band, then into the church, where the three largest were set on the altar; Wordsworth, whom the writer called the chief supporter of these country ceremonies, walked in the procession with his family. The day ended with dancing in a hayloft at the inn to Billy Dawson, who had fiddled for the rushbearing for forty-six years, until the parson sent for the fiddlestick before the Sabbath began. The fiddler remembered the girls carrying the rushes themselves; by then the ringer and clerk laid them in the morning. The rushbearing is still kept at Grasmere every summer.