Garland Day, 13 May, and how it ran out of children

Abbotsbury village. Photo: David Purchase, geograph, CC BY-SA 2.0.

For the best part of two hundred years, every 13 May, which is Old May Day, Abbotsbury kept Garland Day. It started with the children of the village fishermen, who made garlands of flowers to be blessed in church before the mackerel season. Some were carried down to the boats and thrown on the sea. Hutchins wrote it up in his History of Dorset in 1867. When the fishing died out after the First World War the custom carried on with every child in the village. The school gave the day off, two garlands were made, one of wild flowers and one of garden flowers, and they were paraded round the village to collect money and then laid on the war memorial. The school closed in 1981 and the children no longer had the day off, so it moved to the evening. By 2005 only eight children turned out to carry the garlands, and early in the 2010s it stopped. The 2005 film on the Old films page is one of the last records of it. If anyone in the village fancies bringing it back, this page is waiting.