RUSHBEARING IN AMBLESIDE

The custom of bearing rushes to the church comes from the time when houses and churches had earthern floors and rushes were strewn for warmth.  Several times a year, but most thoroughly in summer, they were renewed.  The custom of taking these rushes to church gradually developed into a religious festival, held annually on the feast day of the saint to whom the church was dedicated.. Rushbearings were common all over England, but are now celebrated only in a few places in the North, namely Grasmere, Ambleside, Warcop and one or two others.  The old church in Ambleside was dedicated to S. Anne and on the Saturday nearest to S. Anne’s Day the procession would assemble at the Market Cross at 6 oclock in the evening.  

A description of the event in the 1830s has been preserved in a chapter written by Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley in his book Life and Nature at the English Lakes.  “At six oclock in the evening of the last Saturday in July, we all met - a hundred or more - and then an old man played on his fiddle or his pipe, and off we went round the village, up street and down street, to the same old tune.  We only knew one tune in those days - ‘The Hunt is Up’ - and so up the hill to the old chapel.  There we put our burdens into the corners of the big square pews, and left them till Sunday afternoon, and came back to the Cross for our gingerbread. ……..  Folk came for miles to see the procession, and Wordsworth never missed;  he and the Rydal party would sit in our little room to see the procession start;  and as for Hartley Coleridge, Owen Lloyd and Faber, nothing would do but they must go along with it;  for Hartley loved children, and was, as you may almost say, a child amongst them.”  

The ‘burdens’, which by then had taken the place of the bundles of rushes, were devices of every imaginable shape made by the carpenter for the great ladies, and by the skilful-handed at home during the winter months, all covered with coloured paper and coloured flowers.  Everyone who chose came, young and old and all who carried burdens received a good big cake of gingerbread made by the village baker.  The custom of Rushbearing is still continued at the new Church of S. Mary the Virgin.  It is done as an act of thanksgiving for the heritage of the past, of witness and rededication and a symbol of renewal for the future, a symbolic clearing out of the old rushes (latin: junctus) or rubbish in our lives.