It’s a wet Sunday, horribly early in the morning, five-and-a-half miles outside of Peterborough. A wet Sunday in the Cambridgeshire Fens. A puddle of a day. A drowning day in the Fens when air and ground and sky are soaking. A half mile away, through the mist, I see a fire. Not a fire. It’s the industrial smoke, twisting and dark grey, from a windowless five-storey McCain chips factory. I’m glad we still make the things we really need in this country.
The branches and the bare hedgerows that line the lane in this half-suburban, half-rural sprawl I walk smell rotten. The winter shrubs audibly drip with rain. I’m heading to a medieval ceremony – well, the website says it began in 1980. Soft wet mud clings to my boots, a film of rain runs down from my forehead to my nose, and water drips coldly down my back. I’m on foot, because the roads are flooded. The Fenland sky is low, wet, grey.
In September 1950, Ray Bradbury published a story called “The Long Rain”. I keep being reminded of it as I tramp along the wet fields and sodden pavements approaching Whittlesea. As far as I know, Bradbury, the genius writer of science fiction, never visited the Fens. He was born in Waukegan, Illinois. And “The Long Rain” is set on Venus. In Bradbury’s imagination it is a deluged planet of constant, fatiguing rainfall. It is not a happy place for Bradbury’s astronauts to be. The rain makes them go mad. Venus, in other words, may as well be five and a half miles outside of Peterborough.
It is hard to see clearly in this rain. But I’m getting closer to the meeting place: farm buildings are visible through the mist. There are small fishing lakes to my left. Motionless fishermen, lonely hooded figures in synthetic puffa fabrics, wait silently by the shore. Cars begin to roll along the lane towards the outbuildings, towards the burning that will begin in a few hours. I give way to one vehicle, down into the wet mud, and when I look up a figure with a human body and the head of an owl waves at me from the back seat. They drive away. I don’t believe in transfiguration or magic. I think it unlikely that men can grow owl heads from their bodies. I wonder if, like Bradbury’s astronauts on Venus, the rain is making me see things.
At the gate, a young woman directs the cars into a nearby field. Her high-visibility jacket is printed with an image of a bear, standing up like a man, made from straw. “Oh, it’s really exciting,” she says. “We had the dance on Friday and the festival, a parade, on Saturday.” Today is Sunday – the day of the burning. In the back seats of the cars that pass us there are flashes of coloured cloth. Her family’s friend started all this, she says. But she doesn’t know why. Or what it means. “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s got to do with the plough festival.” She smiles a bit desperately.
I find a man who wants to explain things. He tells me that the Whittlesea Straw Bear Festival was founded in 1980 by the Whittlesea Society. The festival’s origins are older, stretching back to at least the end of the 19th century. Then, whenever “then” really was, there was a custom that on the Tuesday following Plough Monday (the first Monday after Twelfth Night) one of the ploughmen would be dressed in straw and called a “Straw Bear”. Straw was tied around the man’s arms, legs and body. Two sticks fastened to his shoulders met above him and were wrapped in straw too, forming a cone over his head. He couldn’t see. The “bear” would be made to dance in front of pubs and houses for food and gifts. We have no record of how or why a man was selected to be a “bear”. We don’t know whether it was an honour or a punishment. “It was a drink and a dance for the boys after plough season,” says the man. “Just a bit of fun.”
The modern “bear” still dances in front of pubs every January in Whittlesea. The costume is more practical – easy to remove – and people take turns to perform alongside other dancers, particularly Morris dancers, from around the country. It no longer sounds like the tradition is a form of rustic torture. Then again, this is England. You can never be too sure. When I finish downloading information from the man, I walk up to the bear. A straw figure fixed to the ground under the close grey sky in a pit. It looks like the sort of place you dump bodies.
Before the burning, the dancing. Troops of Morris dancers meet on a patch of wet ground. A crowd grows around them in a circle. A few hundred people, three or four deep. There is a specific look among them: pale skin, pale eyes, red beards, ale bellies. I see a man who, down to his spidery limbs and pointed beard, looks like the resurrection of Lytton Strachey. Each dance is announced by a large man in a wide, flowered straw hat. He is well over 6ft tall, strongly built, masculine despite the flowers and the ribbons that cover him, cheerfully aggressive. If he hadn’t been wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses, it would have been easy to imagine him pinning down a poor, squealing plough boy on a winter’s morning in 1880to force the “bear” costume on him. The large man summons the dancers and the musicians. “Plough season is over! This dance is all the way from the Forest of Dean!”
Six dancers and an accordionist move out into the mud, dressed in yellow shirts and black trousers, under tall straw hats. Each dancer wears thick clogs fastened with a buckle. The bells strapped to their calves jangle as they move. Slowly, the dance begins. They face each other, cross the ground, and face each other again. They cross and recross, their feet never still. The dance resembles a march. They stamp. When the dancers pass each other, they turn, jump, and let out a high-pitched whooping scream.
After they finish, several dances later, I ask the leader of one troop when Morris dancing began. Another tall slab of a man, he peers down at me from somewhere above his salt-and-pepper moustache. “Thereby hangs a question,” he says. Like the bear festival itself, these dances are deep mysteries. I sense their origins are hotly disputed. The leader begins to talk of 15th-century wills and medieval stained glass. He speaks of a goblet owned by Henry VIII. All, he believes, provide evidence of primordial Morris dancing that stretches back long into the infancy of England. “But nobody really knows.” I ask him if the dance has any religious significance. He bristles. One of his dancers hears the question and turns. “We are not pagans,” she says.
The crowd begins to gather around the burial pit. I pass a man wearing the head of an owl. Someone shoves him and says, “Shouldn’t you be in a nest?” The atmosphere is festive. People are drinking and carousing. It is just before midday.
A solemn, hollow drumbeat announces the beginning of the end for the bear. Then the merry notes of the accordions rise up from the crowd. There is giggling and shrieking. Children run in circles. Burn him! Burn him! It takes three men to light the bear. The fire takes its time. The flames are shy at first, lingering at the feet, then climbing slowly up a leg. When they reach the cone – the head – the body collapses into blackness. The men around me laugh. “Can you hear him screaming?” one says. “Let me out!” As the smoke rises from the burned-out bear, I look up. The sky is blue. The mud is beginning to dry. The rain has stopped, the mist has lifted. Another plough season is over.
[Further reading: The march of the Pink Ladies]
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This article appears in the 21 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Europe is back
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Subscribe here to commentIt’s only Network Rail that spells the town Whittlesea. Locally it’s spelled Whittlesey