Horn Dancers from Abbots Bromley and Painswick Church Clipping

We'd forgive you for being a little puzzled by this murky amateur film of grown men performing ritualistic dance moves in medieval costumes and reindeer antlers. It was shot by the English Folk Dance and Song Society in an effort to preserve the nation's folk traditions on film, and records two pleasingly quirky calendar customs: the Abbots Bromley horn dance in Staffordshire and the Clipping Sunday service at the parish church of St Mary the Virgin in Painswick, Gloucestershire.

The antlered Abbots Bromley troupe are seen performing their horn dance outside a farmstead, with musicians, a hobby horse and a suspiciously tall Maid Marion (a man in drag) in tow. The custom is performed annually on Wakes Monday (the first Monday after 4 September), and is thought to have originated as a pagan fertility rite. Precisely dating the custom has proved near impossible, though a carbon dating attempt on one of the antlers has suggested that they hail from the eleventh century. The medieval costumes, on the other hand, were made by the local vicar's wife in the 1880s. Then on to Painswick in Gloucestershire, where the annual clipping (or 'clypping') service is enacted by parishioners of St Mary's Church. A brass band leads the procession of faithful through the church yard's manicured yew trees where the children - and some adults - clasp hands and move in as if to hug the church itself. Again, the age of the custom is unknown, though it is thought to have been revived in late Victorian times by the reverend WH Seddon.