Dancing Weekend

Great weekend away with my dance team, Yorkshire Chandelier down in Northamptonshire. It was the weekend of dance organised by Queen's Oak and Rose and Castle. About 15 different dance teams, camping at a Rugby Club for a couple of nights, and dancing at various pubs and villages. Great fun, and brilliant weather.

Good food, good company and a fair amount of beer and wine. There's some lovely villages which we visited on a bus tour on Saturday. Saturday night a ceilidh in the pavilion, and on Sunday we went to Stoke Breune Canal museum - a great place to visit. After a boat trip along the canal, all teams took turns to dance alongside the locks, being careful not to get too close to the edge.

Good to be with our mates Sheffield City Morris again.

Spectacular Morris

It's fairly obvious I'm into folk, and all things related to it, and that (especially if you know my twittername), I'm a clog dancer. I dance northwest clog morris with a team called Yorkshire Chandelier, and have been doing so for over 25 years!  I get really p****d off with the national pastime of knocking our heritage and our traditions, when most other countries take great pride in them.  We can all take a joke - and let's face it, if you admit to being a Morris Dancer you have to be able to :-)   -  but we should celebrate our folk heritage more. This weekend we had a great opportunity to when the National Morris Spectacular took place in Sheffield - about 50 teams of all different traditions danced all day around the city centre - I was pleased to be one of them, although I'm not sure my feet agreed with me at the end of the day. Here's some pictures, hopefully demonstrating the variety of different styles of morris.

And if after all that you want to see some really good, arty ones, Stuart has posted some here.