Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/476

452 apples are worn on "Shick-shack day." At Bristol, boys used to wear oak, and sing the rhyme:—

Rogationtide or Ascension Day.—"Beating the Bounds" was performed until quite recently, at Randwick. At Bristol "in olden times the beating of the city boundaries was an occasion of sport and revelry. The Mayor fished in the Froom, and led a duck hunt at Treen Mills, a pond now represented by Bathurst Basin. There was a state procession to the pond, headed by the city trumpeters, while the bells of Redcliff rang merry peals. The custom began to wane early in the eighteenth century."

Whit Sunday.—Rushes were quite recently (and may be still) strewn in the Church of St. Mary Redclifife, Bristol.

Whit Monday.—A most interesting cheese-rolling is still kept up with great vigour at Cooper's Hill, near Birdlip, on high ground which is grazing Common, and also the site of an ancient encampment. Hundreds of people go out from Cheltenham and Gloucester to see it, every Whit-Monday. This account was given to me in 1907 by a country woman who has seen the ceremony from her childhood. People from Whitcombe and Brockworth parishes assemble on Cooper's Hill Common. A tall pole stands there; it is formally lowered, and then raised up again. It is not necessary to have a new pole every year; the old one is renewed when worn out. The girls of the two parishes used to dance round the pole for a ribbon prize, when my informant was a girl, some twenty to thirty years ago; this is not now done, though a good deal of dancing goes on. Money