St Germans May Tree Fair 2024

This years May Tree Fair will be on Sunday 28th May from 12AM. It will start at the Rec with the dressing of the May Tree, May Pole dancing, stalls, refreshments, tug-o-war, circus skills, live music and morris dancing. The May Tree will then be processed to the Eliot Arms via the church. The procession will be accompanied by musicians playing the May Tree tune. At the pub there will be lots more live music, a drink or maybe two and food.

The May festivities in St Germans have a long history, going back hundreds of years, and lasting in some form until the 1950s. In his Popular Romances of the West of England (1903) Robert Hunt describes a Whitsun festival that used to take place in St Germans. A 'mock mayor' was chosen 'with many formalities, remarkable only for their rude and rough nature' (A number of towns in Cornwall have traditions of electing a mock mayor:- Generally the most innapropitate person they can find, or sometimes inanimate objects, to preside over events). The following day the mock mayor, who had been 'supping too freely of the fair ale' was pulled around on a cart to claim his pretend juristriction... On this day anyone entering the village without the leaf or branch of an oak leaf in there hat was thrown in the trough of water fed by a stream on Nut Tree Hill. The fair was revived in 2012 and is a highlight of the St Germans community calendar.