This Saturday (2nd November) the Beltane Border Morris will be celebrating the old Celtic festival of Samhain in the Museum of Dartmoor Life car park in Okehampton

Dancing will be at 10.30am and 2pm, and in between outside St. James Chapel at 11.30am. The dancers will be joined by friends Lodestone Border Morris and Grimspound Border Morris and special guest Oatley, Dartmoor’s Granite Grey Mare.

There will be dancing, songs, stories and ceremony to call on the ancestors of the Dartmoor. At 3.45pm they will move on to Belstone with dancing outside the Torrs Inn from 4.30pm until 6pm. The museum is decked out for Halloween fun sat the same time before it closes for the winter.

Beltane Morris members have been speaking and exhibiting at the museum and will continue storytelling and sining beforte ging to Belstone where they will be carrying out an ancestor ceremony and fire dancing. Anyone joining the fun are encouraged to wear fairy lights an spooky Dartmoor-inspired costumes.

Samhain is a Gaelic festival on 1 November marking the end of the harvest season and beginning of winter or "darker half" of the year. It is also the Irish language name for November.

Celebrations begin on the evening of 31 October, since the Celtic day began and ended at sunset. This is about halfway between the autumnal equinox and winter solstice. It is one of the four Gaelic seasonal festivals.

Samhain was marked by great gatherings and feasts and was when the ancient burial mounds were open, which were seen as portals to the ‘Otherworld’. Some of the literature also associates Samhain with bonfires and sacrifices.

On Thursday, November 7, at 7pm, the Museum of Dartmoor Life will be hosting professional storytellers Sara Hurley and Lisa Schneidau for an evening of re-imagining Dartmoor folk tales called Chasing Crockern (see photo).

The Museum reopens in March 2025 with a brand new and exciting exhibition called ‘A Shroud For Mother Nature – Is Dartmoor Dying?’