With fundraising underway for the Barwick-in-Elmet Maypole Festival 2025, we discover how the village has kept the old-fashioned tradition alive.
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00:00 I'm Mark Vipond, I'm the Secretary of the Maypole Trust.
00:03 This is the Maypole, Barrick and Elmet,
00:05 the tallest Maypole in Great Britain.
00:07 There's been a Maypole tradition in Barrick for centuries.
00:11 It's hard to say exactly when it started.
00:13 I mean, in itself, it's a pagan symbol.
00:17 So the whole idea of a Maypole festival,
00:20 or a May Festival, was actually based in praising fields
00:24 and worshipping trees and hoping that crops would grow.
00:28 Later on, into perhaps more Christian times,
00:31 it was a very good idea, back in the days
00:33 when infant mortality was particularly high,
00:36 to make sure that babies were born in spring.
00:40 And if you had a big get-together in the village
00:42 for local girls and boys in May, and they got together,
00:47 you would usually find that you had a little baby boom
00:49 in spring, and you didn't have babies in winter
00:51 when they might not survive.
00:52 For quite a few years, a couple of centuries,
00:55 there's records showing that it's been lowered
00:57 and raised every three years.
00:59 There were interruptions for the World War.
01:01 There was an interruption for COVID, which we experienced.
01:04 Up until 1999, it was lowered and raised
01:09 using nothing but ropes and ladders,
01:12 which was a fantastic spectacle
01:14 and involved all of the village.
01:16 It took a good two, three hours
01:17 to get it up on a Maypole day.
01:19 Sadly, at the turn of the millennium,
01:22 the insurers got wind of the fact
01:24 that we were putting a one-ton, 90-foot Maypole up
01:28 with ropes, ladders, and quite a few beers.
01:31 The committee at the time wanted to put a permanent pole up
01:35 and stop the raising.
01:37 A group of villagers, myself included, got involved,
01:42 and we managed to put a plan together,
01:44 which involved a crane at the end of the day.
01:47 We always felt that if it stayed in the ground
01:49 and wasn't lowered or raised, it'd be forgotten.
01:51 One of the downsides to doing it with a crane
01:53 is that you've got to hire a crane.
01:54 And the lowering and the raising,
01:58 there's not an awful lot of change
01:59 from five, 6,000 pounds nowadays for that,
02:02 which is a huge amount to raise as a small charity.
02:05 I mean, there's seven of us on the committee.
02:06 We need a cherry picker to go up
02:08 and put the hoist on for the crane.
02:10 We have to insure it.
02:13 Insurance just this year, just to have it stuck in the ground
02:15 and doing nothing, is 2,000 pounds.
02:18 And that's every year.
02:19 We've got event insurance on top of that.
02:21 For 2025, we've budgeted about 15,000 pounds.
02:24 We're doing all we can to raise it via the village.
02:27 It is about the community.
02:30 It is for the villagers.
02:32 We'll do whatever we can.
02:34 We'll put all the stops out.
02:35 We'll put all the hard work in.
02:36 We put in every Maypole Festival,
02:38 but we are going to have to expect people
02:40 to pay a bit for it.
02:41 It's a central focus to the village.
02:43 I mean, you can go almost anywhere.
02:44 I've been in London sometimes and bumped into people
02:48 and mentioned Barrick, and they say,
02:50 "You're the place for the Maypole, aren't you?"
02:53 That's what it's all about.
02:54 You know, we've got the tallest Maypole in the country.
02:56 We still do everything we can to stick to as much
02:59 of the tradition that has been going on for centuries.
03:01 And it's important to keep up to these things.