Garden trails, duck races, scarecrows and the straw race - the importance of invented tradition

Today was the Cullingworth Garden Trail - 18 gardens opened to the public, selling plants, cakes, tea and, in our case, home made lemonade. The trail has been going for a few years now and its proximate purpose is to raise money for Manorlands, the Sue Ryder Hospice in Oxenhope (the next but one village from Cullingworth, as it were). And a fine job it does in this purpose raising around £3,000 each year for a worthy cause.

But is this the ultimate - the real - purpose of this event? Or does it represent something more fundamental to the English village? These events, like fetes, galas and parades act to bring the people of a place together in a shared activity and to do so celebrating something so quintessentially English as the garden. Folk get to meander round a pleasant place, poking their nose into how other people do things and doing so without fear of challenge for those folk have allowed such investigation to happen. And will sell you tea and a bun into the bargain!

These events - like the legion of scarecrow festivals (Cullingworth has one of these too), duck races such as that held annually in Carleton near Skipton and events that seem to look back to a rural past - the Straw Race at Oxenhope being a fine example. These invented local traditions recreate the elements of village life that existed in the past - the idea of 'holy days', festivals and marking the changing of the seasons or the moments of the working year.

Today's Sunday Telegraph highlighted the way in which bureaucracy gets in the way of these "new traditions" with worries about health & safety, licencing laws, binge drinking and the modern obsession with never closing the highway. Added to this is the malign influence of ambulance-chasing lawyers and the reaction of the insurance industry to the remotest threat of litigation. People want to take part in these invented traditions, they raise millions for charity and the help define places to those who live in them and to folk who visit. Should we not consider whether public authorites can underwrite this voluntary, community-forming activity so as to prevent it all being lost? Or will it be like everything else that defines English tradition - expendable to the authorites and ignored by the City dwellers and sniffy commenters.