Whuppity Scoorie: the Scottish spring ritual bringing a town together
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<p>Children racing round a church tower at Lanark Cross reflects a renewed sense of community and folklore in unsettled times</p><p>The evening light is thinning at Lanark Cross and there is a hush. Then the wee bell in St Nicholas’s church tower, which has lain silent since last autumn, starts up its six o’clock chimes.</p><p>The waiting crowd of children explodes into movement and noise. About a hundred youngsters, helped by grownups, then make three laps clockwis
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Whuppity Scoorie: the Scottish spring ritual bringing a town together Children racing round a church tower at Lanark Cross reflects a renewed sense of community and folklore in unsettled times The evening light is thinning at Lanark Cross and there is a hush. Then the wee bell in St Nicholas’s church tower, which has lain silent since last autumn, starts up its six o’clock chimes. The waiting crowd of children explodes into movement and noise. About a hundred youngsters, helped by grownups, then make three laps clockwise around the church, swinging homemade balls of paper on string above their heads as they run. This is Whuppity Scoorie, a rite of spring that takes place every year in the historic market town of Lanark. Its precise origins are lost to time, but its continued practice and popularity speaks to a revival across the UK of folkloric customs. “It’s about heralding spring and banishing the winter woes,” says Eleanor McLean, the secretary of the Royal Burgh of Lanark community council, which has in recent decades hosted the event that takes place every 1 March, aside from when that falls on a Sunday – as happened this year, meaning it moved to the second day of the month. McLean says local historians have an array of theories about the original practice of the tradition and its unusual name. It was first reported in the Hamilton Advertiser in 1893, when it was claimed the tradition was already 150 years old. Since the mid-19th century Whuppity Scoorie has been known as a children’s festival that marks the end of the curfew of dark nights with a wild celebration of street play. The colourful paper balls chase away the duller, darker spirits of winter, but in an earlier version the town’s children tied up their caps with long strings and whirled them around to see off the young apprentices coming home from the mills at New Lanark. And further back still, the custom may have been linked to ancient religious penitents who were whipped around the church, then wa...
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