Ottery St Mary

Ottery St Mary is a little town just north of Exeter, which is on the south coast of the country. It would usually be one of those places you pay a fleeting visit to before moving onto another town, both of which you'd probably forget in due course.

Once a year however it plays host to one of the strangest things I have ever witnessed, something that is at its heart, truly English. Put simply, residents of the town set alight tar soaked barrels and carry them on their back through the streets of the town. Sounds dangerous enough, the barrels have been soaked in tar all year in preparation, they burn alright. One would think that the safest place to observe such an event would be from the safety of your hotel window.

However, for reasons that no one can adequately explain, crowd participation is mandatory. Put another way, the residents carry the barrels through streets packed to the rafters with people who are generally very drunk or very stoned. The result is a kind of running with the bulls type effect, a mass of people moving out of the way as some loon literally charges through the crowd with a massive flaming barrel on his or her back. This is, of course, very dangerous. Quite often the crowd was asked to move aside to let through an ambulance taking another burns victim to hospital.

What is probably most odd about this event is that no one really seems to know why they do it. One explanation was that it was a pagan ritual designed to burn away evil spirits from the town, however it started in the 17th century, pagans had long since gone by then. What you're left with is a tradition which people do just because they've been doing it for a long time. In reality, this is as good a reason as any to keep doing it. In a world of spiralling insurance costs though, one has to think that the days of tar barrelling are numbered, which is a great shame indeed.