Montol and Midwinter Light by Ysella Sims

On midwinter’s eve, as the northern hemisphere tips furthest away from the sun and the days are shortest, I’m in Penzance, the most westerly town in Cornwall. I’m here for Montol, a celebration of the midwinter solstice when time stands still and darkness turns to face the light. In our digital, disconnected age, I’m curious about this analogue, community-centred reimagining of folk traditions from across the Penwith promontory with its reputation for rebellion and ribaldry.

The rented apartment which is our home for the weekend is small, neat and clean. When I’m inside I can’t tell what the weather is doing, or what time of day it is. It’s too bright, sealed and warm. It makes me glad for our draughty house in Devon built into the red earth hill, for the way that it lives and breathes, reminding us that we are part of the environment. Over Christmas a virtual crackling beechwood fire will top the list of most-streamed Netflix shows. For all our sophistication we’re still creatures seeking out primal comforts, guided by and in thrall to the seasons.

On the morning of Montol, I wake before the others and go out with the dog. It’s a grey blank day, the air full of mist and mizzle. As I pass a neighbouring house a terrier hops on arthritic legs down the front steps, barking. A row of Victorian terrace houses climb Britons Hill away from the harbour, Christmas trees shimmering in their bay windows, their obstinate facades wearing practised decades of cheek-turning to the wind’s slaps. When I reach the dog walking field overlooking Penzance harbour I can just make out the faint outline of St Michael’s Mount in the bay.

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Montol, a Cornish word translated variously as solstice and also balance (from the Latin, Trutina – a set of scales) is Penzance’s annual arts festival. Brought to life by the community in 2007, it revives, reimagines and creates new folk traditions from the area, building on a resurgence in interest from a younger generation seeking out space for magic and spirituality, for protest and inclusiveness in an increasingly secular, atomised world.

In the Celtic tradition solstices are referred to as the ‘thin place’ – the delicate divide between the spiritual and corporeal; a time of transition and change, of renewal and transformation. At Montol, the world is turned upside down as ‘guisers’ – revellers dressed in the costumes of magic and the macabre – imagine other ways of being, mocking the rich and shaking a stick at death and the dark. Perhaps the renewed interest in folk – folk horror movies, folk music, folklore and customs, are a response to our need for ritual, ceremony, and for shared beliefs that bond us.

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As the rain and dark seep in across the bay, we’re called to the town’s ancient streets by a drum, whistle, and an elemental hum. I’m ready for the liminality, to let go of the old, and invite in something new. On Chapel Street outside the Union Hotel, crowds are gathering for the Progress of the Sun. The Lord of Misrule, ‘Tom’, an impish jester in a bowler hat and tailcoat, brandishes a holly-twined staff, ready to lead us, and we are ready to follow.

Behind him two bearers, one draped in white fur like the snow queen, hold up a sun made from paper, gold foil, and willow. The bearers jump, whoop and shake it, half in veneration, half in victory as the sound of a looping Cornish folk melody plays; a unity of drums, fiddles, bells and kazoos. I fall in step, feeling self-conscious in my anorak and jeans, but hypnotised by the music making my feet and heart thump together.

We wind through the streets, the rain giving way to the winds of the next winter storm, stirring feathers, tatters and flags. I turn back to see the procession – Tom dancing and shaking his staff, pounding the ground with sexual, saturnalian charge, the band, masked and festooned with holly, ivy and lights, the skeletal, macabre osses, their jaws clacking and eyes burning blue, leering and swooping. A smiling young woman, flowers in her hair – long and golden like a fairytale – teases, cajoles and flirts with a giant crow.

A hunting horn electrifies the throng of wyrd creatures and guisers, a rippling tide of capes and crowns, fairy lights and feathers, velvet, scales and antlers. Drawn like a rat to the pied piper, I weave with them through people, cameras and parked cars, pushing through the streets as people come to their windows and doors, carried along in the dark towards who knows where.

I feel as if I am held and falling, both knowing and uncertain. A current passes through me, a connection to something deep and old, to the past, present and future, to a time when our survival was bound more tangibly to the return of the sun. I dance, knowing that I am connected to everyone in this midwinter liminality, this opening to beginnings and endings, to constancies and love; we are meeting in the middle place, walking the line between dark and light.

At the recreation ground, we stand behind a low fence as Tros and Trey lead the dancers around the fire. Osses and musicians hold hands as the sun is ceremonially felled, set alight to chants of ‘burn him!’ and ‘viva the sun!’. We surge forward, trampling the fence into the mud like creatures drawn towards the light. A chorus of jeers and boos goes up as the fire service moves in to douse the flames. ‘But what will you do when the harvest fails next year?’ a voice quips from the crowd.

I think of another folk festival in an affluent village in a wooded Dartmoor village – a celebration of spring that is the antithesis of this visceral, bawdy nose-thumbing to establishment, more of a popularity contest, a meme, with none of this carnal charge – a festival of upholding, rather than challenging, the established order.

Montol’s spirit lives in a spark, an ember that flits, igniting a performance – the teasing of the osses, the dancing of the morris, the leading of the sun –  before ebbing and puttering, jumping to spark another moment. I think of Brian Eno saying that ‘Art is the way we digest possible futures and imagine other worlds’, and of the counter cultural moments when younger generations embraced the power of the collective to push back against the permissible and imagine new ways.

When we emerge back into the streets, the night has turned. It feels edgier, darker. We join a new procession – to the sea. The music is slower, more foreboding, the fire, juggled, breathed and held high, making the air heavy with paraffin. Torches cast hot yellow into the sky. At the harbour, Tas Nadelik, midwife to the new year, pulls the mock from the pram, chalking it and setting alight like a sacrificial child. The crowd joins hands, knocking and bumping in a rowdy circle around the fire. Across the harbour, lights stretch around the headland, pin pricks in a cloth of dark.

Back in Chapel Street the Guild of Corn Street Revellers  goising between pubs where Robert Louis Stevenson drank with smugglers and pirates. The pubs are growing dank with bodies and rain-soaked clothes, with warm shared breath, lively with youngsters returned home for Christmas. At the Admiral Benbow two pirates are at the first-floor window fending off sprouts hurled from the street with cheers and heckles. One of the pirates blows a hunting horn at the crowd and is hit in the face by a sprout.

“What’s it about?” we ask a woman pushing through the crowd.

“No idea, it’s very Cornish!”, she says, without stopping.

But this new folk tradition doesn’t have to make sense – it feels revolutionary to create space for joy, freedom and irreverence.

In the Globe – a sweaty pub, loud with football on bright screens and drunk rugby lads – there are real pirates. A tall bulky man, a tattoo stretching the length of his neck, stands at the bar wearing an air of violence. A young woman, almost transparent, her painted white toenails showing from open white sandals, laces her hands around his neck, pulling his gaze to hers to calm him. The air expands when he goes back out into the night.

In the crush of the Turk’s Head a youngster parts the crowd to help me out from the bar as I balance two pints of Guinness in plastic cups.

Montol holds contradictions – old and new, darkness and light, reverence and irreverence. Darkness is as much a part of life and new beginnings as the light. We can burrow into the dark and restore, linger in the between-space, watching for the glimmer of new life, ideas, energy to emerge. In our anxious, uprooted and secular age, the ache for connection to each other and the earth feels palpable. The message I’m carrying from the middle place is that we’re better together, stronger when collectively we believe in something bigger than us; that even in the darkness we can begin to make good things happen.

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Ysella Sims is a writer, poet and performer whose work explores identity, belonging and our connection to place. Based in the rural South West, she writes from the edges, seeking connection in the in-between. Read more on her Substack.