- Date: Monday, 8 January 2024
- Time: 9.00 pm‐10.00 pm
- Location: Royal Oak
- Address: High Green, Great Ayton, TS9 6BW
Leven Sword will be performing the traditional Cleveland Fool Plough Play in The Royal Oak at 9:00pm on Plough Monday.
The play is recorded in J. Horsfall Turner’s ‘Yorkshire Anthology, Ballads and Songs, Ancient and Modern’ published in 1901.
The local plough stots were mentioned by J. Fairfax-Blakeborough, who wrote in ‘Cleveland Villages’ in 1938, in the past: “Ayton possessed a team of plough stots, young men who, taking the place of the oxen (stot denotes a young ox) and drawing the plough in procession on Plough Monday, the first Monday after Twelfth Day, the Feast of the Epiphany, were accompanied by sword dancers and a band of musicians and collected money for the feasting which was to follow and which marked the close of the Christmas holiday”.
So come and watch our sword dancers and join our band of musicians in a song and dance session after the play. We will be collecting in aid of Cleveland Mountain Rescue Team rather than for feasting!
Information and image courtesy of Leven Sword