I'm currently designing the publicity material for 'Cowslip Sunday 2012' – you should be able to see the 'work-in-progress' version above. For this year's Cowslip Sunday – and as part of my Masters degree – I am creating an art installation along a secluded woodland path, as well as making a film that is intended to both document the day itself and to record the transition from winter to spring on the local landscape. I will blog about both the installation and the film in more detail some other time. Here I want to give a little background to the revival of 'Cowslip Sunday'.
I've been involved with the revived event since it's current inception. David Longford, another resident of Lambley (the Nottinghamshire village where I live) got in touch with me and expressed an interest in starting an 'arts festival' based locally. His original idea had been to launch an event on or near St George's Day - as a celebration of England and Englishness, but I had remembered reading the following (from the Flora Britannica Book of Spring Flowers - by Richard Mabey):
In Lambley, Nottinghamshire, a dearth of wild specimens has meant that the ceremony of 'Cowslip Sunday' has had to resort to garden-grown flowers: 'Cowslip Sunday' is celebrated in Lambley on the first Sunday in May. Nowadays the occasion is marked by having a basket of cowslips on the altar at the morning service in the Parish Church… Formerly, when cowslips grew more profusely in the wild, parties of people travelled out from nearby Nottingham on Cowslip Sunday to buy bunches of cowslips picked by local children. Some local residents, now in their eighties, remember selling the flowers to day trippers.
It seemed to me that this gave us a more interesting and original basis for a local arts festival - with its specific geographic and cultural links.
I wouldn't have had much idea of how to go about reviving the occasion - or what it might consist of - but a few months later David got back in touch and asked me if I would be willing to design (free of charge - because there was very little budget for the event) the material to promote the occasion… and Cowslip Sunday was reborn!
Here's how the event was reported on the BBC website:
Villagers revive rural folk tradition Cowslip Sunday
The residents of a Nottinghamshire village are reviving a forgotten rural folk tradition.
Every year in Victorian times tourists would travel to the village of Lambley to buy cowslips, which grew wild and in abundance around the village.The flowers of the plant were then turned into wine. The event was a time for merrymaking. On Sunday, 2 May 2010, the celebrations return with folk tales, live performance and a ceilidh.
Playwright and Lambley resident David Longford has researched Cowslip Sunday, traditionally held on the first Sunday in May, for a play being performed on the day.
"[It] was a joyous community event that was both a celebration of springtime and of Lambley itself. Its height of popularity was in the mid-19th century. At the time Lambley was a centre of the stocking frame cottage industry, hard work for poor pay. The village's children would collect the cowslips from the surrounding fields and sell them to be made into wine."
"I read a report in the Nottinghamshire Guardian of 1863 of coachloads coming from Nottingham into Lambley. People would buy the cowslips and then stay and make merry. [For the villagers] it was a great way of making a bit more money and also a relief from the hard work," said Mr Longford.
The festivities begin with a procession through the village. This will be followed by a free open-air rustic play, performed by local actors and musicians, telling a little about the history of Lambley and a celebration of the cowslip. The night will end with a ceilidh in the village hall.
