Festive landscapes: the contemporary practice of well-dressing in Tissington

Abstract

Well-dressing is a festive practice that takes place in many Derbyshire Villages. Each summer wooden boards are coated in clay and flower petals are pressed into them to make pictures, these are then used to adorn local wells and water sources. This article examines well-dressing in the village of Tissington in relation to different aspects of the Peak District Landscape. It argues that well-dressing is the product of specific geological characteristics of the landscape. It asserts that the practice produces new forms of affective landscape. These include readings of the botanical landscapes and the community landscapes that form around the event. It goes on to argue that well-dressing also makes visible a hegemonic landscape that structures village life. Detailed analysis of this event reveals connections between the local and the global and articulates a set of diverse landscapes which texture contemporary rural life.

Keywords:

• Well-dressing
• affective landscapes
• Peak District
• Derbyshire
• folk
• custom
• Tissington

Notes

1. A small number of villages that border the county in Staffordshire, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire also practice the tradition. In addition well-dressing takes place in a small amount of locations outside this specific geographic region, particularly in the western counties of England, though it rarely takes the distinctive Derbyshire form of pictures made from flower petals, pressed into clay coated wooden boards (see Naylor & Porter, 2002).

2. Ascension Day is part of the Christian calendar, it falls 40 days after Easter and commemorates Jesus Christ’s ascension into heaven.

3. There is an earlier source relating to 1758, however this reported the wells being adorned by garlands, not the petalled boards which have become central to the tradition (Christian, 1972, p. 46).

4. Folk Archive and the exhibition at the Tate are part of a wider recovery of interest in the subject by artists and institutions. This includes the artist Vladimir Arkhipov’s collections of handmade objects from soviet era Russia and beyond (Arkhipov, 2006), together with exhibitions such as An Alternative Guide to the Universe at the Hayward Gallery (Wertheim, 2013) which presented the work of ‘outsider artists’ as a challenge to orthodox understandings of society, and Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum (Grindon & Flood, 2014) which showed handmade and collectively created objects that had been used by different protest movements in struggles towards social change.

5. The Tissington Trail is a walking/cycling trail developed on the site of a closed down railway line.