Stranger things

Burning barrels, hare-pie scrambles, bottle kicking and horn dances: no one does eccentric quite like the English. Harry Pearson explores our weird, wonderful and sometimes distinctly dangerous folk festivals

- Harry Pearson

A BURLY, bearded man rumbles through the winding streets of the little Devon town. His face is streaked with soot and sweat. On his shoulders, an 18-gallon sherry cask soaked with tar crackles, spits and flares. 'Uppard! Uppard!' the man bellows as the crowd parts and he gallops on. Comet trails of orange and yellow sparks follow him, swirling up into the night sky like a murmuration of hellish starlings. It is November 5 in Ottery St Mary, an annual day of flames and explosions that dates back to at least the early 17th century. 'The smell of the tar and the heat of the flames gives you a real adrenaline rush,' says Andy Wade, president of the Ottery St Mary Carnival committee. 'It's a feeling you can't explain.'

Some historians and folklorists trace the festival in Ottery back to pagan fire festivals, the fumigation of plague-ridden streets or the beacons lit in 1588 to warn of the approach of the Spanish Armada. Mr Wade-who has close to six decades of experience of the tar barrels behind him-believes it all goes back to Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot. "There were a number of towns in Devon where they rolled burning barrels through the streets on November 5, Mr Wade explains, 'but it was only in Ottery that people decided to pick them up and carry them.'

The Ottery St Mary Tar Barrels is one of dozens of genuine folkloric celebrations woven into the English calendar. It occupies a place alongside the Hallaton Hare Pie Scramble and Bottle Kicking in Leicestershire, West Witton's Burning the Bartle in North Yorkshire and the Horn Dance at Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire as an annual reminder of a time when the English countryside was a stranger, wilder, rowdier and less governable place.