Pagan origins of a Christian Festival

It is said that, when the ancient Beaker Folk of these island felt a bit short of rain, they didn't go in for blood sacrifices. And they didn't waste their time doing too much dancing about, appealing to the heavens. No, they simply put on their best woad, left their wattle-and-daub abodes, walked up to Stonehenge, and pitched their tents for a few days' praying and camping.

Sometimes this form of sympathetic magic was so powerful they would have to swim home.

It is often said, by people who have based an entire fictitious religious history of these island on one comment by Gregory, quoted by Bede, that the incoming Christians took over pagan festivals and turned them into Christian ones. But for once, this time they are right. The Ancient Beaker Folk probably called the festival something like Elknogiswold, which was pronounced "Eggnog", or Brandsuitsnacht, pronounced "Balham". But both of those words would almost certainly have referred to the band of moss and mould growing on a wide band of canvas around the saturated bottom of the tents.

Today, Christians still celebrate the same festival, with the same aim. Being more middle-class these days, of course, they won't head off to the wild Celtic fringes of the edges of Southern England - preferring the genteel environs of Cheltenham. But they still get together, pray, watch the rain falling and get wet. And they still name the festival after the ring of mould growing round the bottom of the tents. Which is why it's called "Greenbelt".

I remember attending a Greenbelt festival in 1986 in a corner of rural Northamptonshire. The rain-prayers that year were so powerful that the place was hit by the tail-end of a hurricane. The toilets - and I use the word as  loosely as many people used the toilets - were rumoured to be full, and their contents to be on the way down the hill. In apocalyptic scenes people retrieved their tents from hedges, shoved them soaking into the boots of their cars and attempted to escape home through the quag where once a dirt track had been.

As we drove across Oxfordshire yesterday through the teeming rain I rejoiced that, once again, the rain-prayers are working.