"Our event took place at the beginning of July 2005, It went very well, we were really pleased with it and so, I think, was everyone else in the town. I’ve just been putting together press cuttings before and after, and we’ve had very positive feedback. It will definitely have lasting effects in the local community.

We wouldn’t have been able to do this without the help of the LHI. When we first thought about it, we realised that putting on such an event presents a lot of challenges, and we needed some very specific skills.

We knew that we needed a really good Beast that we could use now and in the future, so we allocated a large part of our budget for that - it cost £3,000. We had to write a very detailed brief, which we put out to see who would come forward with ideas. Then we put the best of the ideas together and commissioned someone who had the technical expertise to produce it - he does this sort of thing professionally and has worked for the West End stage, and for the Ordinalia in West Cornwall.

The Beast had to be scary in a way that people could relate to, but it also had to work physically - somebody had to wear it, and it had to be transferred between different performers. We recruited a group of young men who could in turn both hunt the Beast and be the Beast.

Young men were one of the groups in the population that tended not to be involved in the previous versions of the Bodmin Day. So we deliberately encouraged young men who were well known in the town - the kind of people everyone would look up to - so that it would become something that boys in Bodmin would want to be part of. We want them to look forward to the day when maybe they could be one of those huntsmen, when can it be their turn.

We also had professional help with the script for the play, which was written by two people, the Chair of Bodmin Lions, and a man who’s been professionally involved in events like this in different places, working with school children on Cornish heritage. He also directed it for us. For the play, we particularly tried to recruit older men. It’s often much easier to engage women in these events than to engage the men. So we were deliberately compensating for that.

About 20 people got involved in organising the day from the practical point of view, another 20 took part in the play and the hunt, plus 15 musicians, lots more volunteers working on the sidelines before and after, and over 100 schoolchildren.

There’s always been a tradition of dance associated with the Bodmin Day, so part of it featured children dancing down through the town. On the back of the LHI scheme, we also managed to get some additional funding for somebody to do workshops with them to create little hobby horses which they made with Scrapstore type materials and then they all had a drink and a bun in the park at the end of it all.

We now have the play, and the Beast - the core of the celebration which will be ongoing, and will provide other opportunities for people to find out more about the history of the town, which is very long and complicated, and to celebrate it. Lots of ideas to build on in the future."