Wassailing brought to France

The village where Victoria is now living, Whimple in East Devon, was historically a cider and perry making area and the former home of Whiteways Cider, now sadly replaced with a housing estate.  

However, cider is still produced there by a Courtney's of Whimple, www.courtneysofwhimple.co.uk, who bought out, in 2015, the retail section of Vigo Presses, who sell all the equipment for cider making and much more.  Whimple is also famous for it's wassail, in this case an orchard visiting ceremony as opposed to the more common traditional house visiting carol singing.  This is an annual event held during the evening of 17th January each year, old twelfth night, where the locals continue a ceremony of pagan origin, where the previous harvest is celebrated and to wish good luck for a bumper harvest for the coming year, through incantations, songs and general merriment!  For more information look up Whimple and wassailing on  Wikipedia.

Well, this year due to the covid lockdown, the event was not able to take place, but Vigo Presses decided to invite people to enter a virtual wassail competition and send in their photos and videos, which can be viewed on the Vigo Presses Facebook page, linked from their website. vigopresses.co.uk

Well, I decided to introduce the idea of wassailing to our French neighbours, which unfortunately couldn't be done at night with flaming torches as we have a covid curfew currently in place.  But a good time was had by all with plenty of noise, cider apple cake and even a French version!  I'll post a link, to  to people who receive my blog notifications, to a full version of the video on my OneDrive, and some shorter pieces below here and in another post, as the videos are too "big" to all go on one post!

The end of Incantation