Labyrinth Summer Festival: Reimagining Scilly’s Lost Mazey Folklore
Over the spring and summer months something unusual has been unwinding on the Isles of Scilly’s coasts. Part public art project, part archeological investigation, we have been venturing into the unique heritage of Scilly’s pebble mazes. The Scilly Labyrinths Project - led by local artists Teän Roberts and Layan Harman and supported by Scilly Arts and Heritage, Arts Council England, National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Wildlife Trust - has explored this unusual practice of making small labyrinths from stones on the islands. The earliest example - Troy Town Maze on St Agnes (circa 1729) - is the only known pre-20th-Century pebble maze in the UK, and many more have sprung up across the archipelago, inspired by this enigmatic original.
Troy Town Maze, St Agnes
While Scilly is rich in sites like the labyrinths - ritual marks left on the landscape by earlier peoples - much of out islands’ oral storytelling tradition was lost during periods of depopulation, and our old folklore along with it. Now, in the first weekend of August (timed to coincide with the traditional thanks-giving festival of Lammas celebrated elsewhere in Europe), we reimagine a kind of mazey folk practice to accompany the labyrinths, with the help of visiting folk musicians and artists.
A focal point of the project so far has been researching and restoring one of Scilly’s much-loved labyrinths Giant’s Castle Maze on St Mary’s. This stone-and-turf labyrinth was made by two local children in 1952 but had recently become very overgrown and was at risk of vanishing entirely. With the help of a dedicated team of volunteers working earlier this summer, this maze was recently restored to a usable labyrinth once more.
Giant’s Castle Maze - pre restoration
Giant’s Castle Maze - during restoration
Giant’s Castle Maze - after restoration
Now, on Sunday 3rd August, we will be holding a celebratory reopening of Giant’s Castle Maze with a procession out along the coast path (meet at Old Town Beach at 3.00pm) to Giant’s Castle Maze, where folk musicians Daisy Rickman and Goblin Band will lead us in traditional Cornish labyrinthine dances, the serpent-dance and the snail-creep, and a new folkloric custom will begin.
Proceeding this event, on Saturday 2nd August, the bands will play a free gig at the Old Town Inn to kick off the Labyrinth Summer Festival with their unique blend of folk music. A local of Mousehole, and fresh from Glastonbury festival, Daisy Rickman’s sonorous tones are transfixing, bewitching and endlessly etherial. She is counter-balanced by Goblin Band’s rowdiness, who play traditional English folk music with fearless energy. The music will be accompanied by lost cocktails and strange snacks inspired by Scilly’s mazes and concocted by visiting culinary artists Poppy Litchfield and Anaïs Serres. A night not to be missed.
For more information, visit the project website: www.scillylabyrinths.com
Read our research on the project blog: www.scillylabyrinths.com/blog
Or join the dedicated Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/scillylabyrinthsproject