More than 70 people gathered in Carhampton Community Orchard on Old Twelfth Night, Monday, January 17, for the traditional Wassail ceremony.

The Wassail, an ancient tradition dating back to Anglo-Saxon times, was carried out to bless the apple orchards and ensure a good harvest for the following year’s cider, which was used as part-pay for farm workers.

After dying out across the West Country with the decline of orchards in the early 20th century, Wassailing was first revived at the Butchers Arms in Carhampton in the 1920s and has also taken place in the community orchard since 1992, as well as spreading to other local orchards.

The ceremony is now familiar to many local residents - one tree from the orchard is selected as the Wassail tree, cider-soaked pieces of toast are put into a fork of its branches to invite good spirits to the orchard, volleys of gunshots are fired to scare away the evil ones and a libation of cider is poured on its roots.

Monday night’s ceremony started with the traditional Carhampton Wassail song, led by singer and raconteur Martyn Babb, with the crowd joining in the chorus:

Old apple tree, we wassail thee

and hope that thou wilt bear

hatfuls, capfuls, three bushel bagfuls

and a little heap under the stair

William Neal, aged seven, from Minehead was invited to put the cider-soaked toast in the tree, and Martyn Babb and friends followed with more music, including Martyn’s own ballad recounting the village’s successful campaign to save the orchard site from building development in 1989.

Another of the orchard’s most longstanding supporters, Brian Heaton, entertained the crowd with tunes from his melodeon, as he has done at orchard events since it was first saved from the developers. And as at every Carhampton Wassail, visitors were treated to mulled cider and hot and cold food provided by orchard stalwarts Roland Husebo and Vicky Barber.

Last year there was no public Wassail in Carhampton, due to Covid precautions, although orchard founder-member Keith Jones conducted a solo event to ensure a good harvest in spite of the absence of a crowd!

However, Carhampton’s Wassail has received significant national publicity over the past two years. The 2019 Wassail was filmed for the BBC as part of its Heavenly Gardens programme, aired at Easter 2020, and an extended article focusing on Carhampton’s Wassail was published in the Winter 2021 edition of Evergreen magazine, a national quarterly. And so Carhampton’s fame continues as the centre of a folk tradition which is now spreading ever wider.

For more information about Carhampton Community Orchard, or to join the Orchard Friends email list, contact Elizabeth Atkinson at [email protected]