Being Hedge
On witches, secret schools and the lure of the solitary
✵ I’m hosting a very rare weekend retreat in the US this October! In Salt Lake City, Utah. We’re releasing full details on Wednesday via email - sign up here to get them in your inbox as soon as tickets are released.
✵ I have a few UK live appearances coming up:
Wednesday 8th May: Books on the Hill, St Albans (they’ve released a second set of tickets if you tried before and it was booked).
Tuesday 14th May: Brighton Festival with Cariad Lloyd
Monday 20th May: Backstory Books, Balham - no booking link yet, will keep you posted
Saturday 25th May: Cooking, Eating and Feeling Through the Seasons with Angela Clutton, part of the British Library’s Food Season (weekend passes are available and it looks great)
✵ If you asked for a free subscription - you don’t need to do anything! It’s just been applied to your account and you can see all the paid posts. Sorry I implied last week that you need to check for an email - I was wrong! It is often thus.
Now, for your stray attention this weekend…
May Day arrived this week, bringing with it an exuberance of green in the woodlands and roadsides. I don’t know if it all breaks out as suddenly as it seems to, or whether I just look around and notice the flourish of life when May comes around. Either way, there is a distinct shift in the year. Summer is a-coming in…
Unlike last year, I didn’t attend the waking of Jack-in-the-Green at 4.30am because it was a school night and Bert wouldn’t let me go without him. We marked it in our own way instead, singing Hal-an-tow in the car on the way to school, and then again on the way home that evening. It’s hard to gather at these key moments in the year, especially now that our folk customs have stopped being central to national life. And especially if, like me, you never can find a particularly compelling reason to go out.
Perhaps this is why I love the work of Lucy Wright, an artist who draws on folklore and activism to suggest new ways of interacting with the year. For those of us who can’t (or won’t) take part in a May Morning event, she suggests a ‘hedge’ - i.e. solo - morris dance. It’s a way of connecting with the tradition in your own space and time.
In my opinion, it’s perfectly okay to dance up the sun tomorrow, on the first Monday after May Day, if that’s a better fit. You can watch Lucy’s own dance on her Instagram, and her solo show, Oss Girls, is currently at the Field System gallery in Newton Abbot until 18th May. I’m hoping to interview her for this newsletter very soon.
This got me thinking about the word ‘hedge’, which, when used as an adjective, has come to mean a solitary or breakaway iteration of a more widespread practice, perhaps with a subversive, countercultural or outsider edge. It is most familiar, I think, in the term hedge witch (or hedgewitch), meaning a woman who practises the Craft alone, outside of a coven.
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