At Pagan Spring we converged a mere nine days before the traditional Mayday celebration of Beltane (one of the four Gaelic seasonal festivals, along with Samhain, Imbolc, and Lughnasadh) - which ushered in an early summer, as herdsmen started to move their flocks out to pasture.

As part of these festivities, villagers gathered hawthorn branches and flowers to decorate the outside of their houses, celebrating new growth and fertility. They opened the Twmpath Chwarae (or "tump for playing" - a kind of village green), and staged a mock battle between Summer & Winter. Winter carried a blackthorn stick & a shield clad with wool and threw straw & kindling at Summer, bedecked in flowers and ribbons, who lashed back (triumphantly) with birch & fern. The village whooped, & crowned a new May King and Queen, and feasted happily til dawn.

People continued to gather in the evenings to dance and play sports, and sing “Carolau Mai” - bawdy, sexual songs. Singers roved between the houses with fiddlers and harpists, and all made merry - drinking beer elderberry and rhubarb wines, mead & woodruff - “a tonic for their hearts”.

Our contemporary version of pagan song was both the very best in melodic techno, purveyed in the Great Meadow by our favourite female d(j)eities (ensconced in ceremonial settings; attended by innumerable performative sprites) - and more shamanic sounds in our more intimate Glen; that fusion of masculine and feminine that distinguishes the pagan.

It was one more step on our quest to reinvent modern ritual; enhance our connection and ecstasy; unify our community in all our various collective forms of open worship.