Here's a day for your Brigg calendar.
The annual Pump Blessing - or Blessing of the Pumps - ceremony will take place in the town centre on Saturday, June 9, 2018.
Three groups of dancers are expected to be involved in this colourful and traditional crowd-pleaser.
Brigg Town Business Partnership will issue a full programme, with times, nearer the date.
The old town water pumps that will be blessed and decorated with flowers are beside the County Bridge and on Grammar School Road South.
Weather permitting, this will draw a big crowd to Brigg.
One ancient tradition that dwindled out at the start of the C20th was the annual appeasement of the impish creatures who lived and controller the Ancholme Valley.
ReplyDeleteLike many ceremonies it was a strange mixture of paganism and Christainity and involved pouring water back into the Ancholme with recitals that local folk will do nothing to disturb the imps who lived along and in the Ancholme.
At that time, the river was an important source of food....fish and waterfowl to the locals.
When Dutch navvies initially drained the valley by cutting the New Ancholme they were warned that the river umps could become angry and take revenge on anyone disturbing their existence.
At worked progressed, some of the navvies became extremely ill and others were injured, or killed when fire broke out in their tented encampments.
This was offered as proof as the river umps retribution.
On reflection, However, it seems that as the cannalisation of the New Ancholme progressed trapped bog gas, essentially methane was released and this gas filled the accommodation camps affecting some of the navvies and a naked light could ignite trapped bog gas inside a tent causing fire and explosions.
However, countries such as Iceland and Scandanavian countries still respect the imps of the countryside.
For example, a construction of a new road in Iceland was diverted to avoid a important religious place of the trolls....while in Norway, it is quite normal for government departments to consult the countryside imps before changes are incorporated into the landscape...