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Lost Landscapes Musical Performances
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Lost Landscapes Musical Performances
Location: Kent
Gail Duff and Bing Lyle local songwriters and musical performers are working with the local people and writing special songs for all 6 communities.
On Saturday 29th January 2005 the people of Chartham Hatch gathered for a special event reviving the ancient tradition of apple wassailing. This tradition was carried out many years ago in Kent and is being revived as part of Lost Landscapes.
No Mans Orchard is a community orchard, jointly owned by Chartham and Harbledown Parish Councils, and is managed traditionally.
Performers dressed up as a Celt, Geoffrey Chaucer and the miller from the Canterbury Tales, a local farmworker and milkmaid, a haymaker and his wife, an escapee from the local asylum and an ARP warden from the Second World War.
As dusk fell at the orchard, the specially written wassail songs were sung accompanied by a violin as a wooden bowl filled with mulled cider was passed around the performers and visitors. In the past, shot guns would have been used and volleys of bullets send through the trees but the group used tambourines and drums instead. A piece of toast was placed on a tree and salt scattered on the ground. Special torches were lit as the group paraded back to Chartham Hatch Village Hall for a celebration tea followed by a barn dance. The orchard had a fine crop of apples the following autumn..
On Saturday 12th March 2005 a concert was held at the Church barn in Charing. For this second event written by Gail and Bing, local people dressed up as King Henry VIII, auxiliary home guards, flint miners and market traders and sang specially written songs to an invited audience.
On Saturday 26th March 2005 we held another musical event in Cuxton. The event was entitled 'Cuxton - a year in Flora and Fauna' and readings from the wonderful nature diary of Elizabeth Summers were interspersed with traditional songs and dancing.
On Saturday 16th April 2005 the people of Chilham gathered in St Mary's Church for the latest Lost Landscapes Musical Event written by Gail and Bing. Puck was the narrator who took people on a journey through time from the earliest hunter gatherers, through Pilgrims and Thomas Colpeper to the wonderful film A Canterbury Tale made in 1944 in the fictitious village of Chillingbourne and the hop pickers all set to music and verse.
On Tuesday 24th May 2005 Hollingbourne Village Hall was packed with people enjoying the latest Lost Landscapes musical presentation - 'Hollingbourne Memories'.
Through songs, dance and verse, pupils from Hollingbourne Primary School revived memories of World War 2, Vera's Van, Happiness Hall as well as farming on the downs, the watermill industry and the famous flooding of the River Bourne.
A wonderful evening was had by all.
It has been decided that a special celebration concert will take place towards the end of the Project.
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