Cross Tree, danced by Beltane Border Morris

This was a dance inspired by the old Cross Tree, also known as the Dancing and Punchbowl Tree that once stood on Cross Street in Moretonhampstead on Dartmoor. Beltane Border Morris held a winter dance workshop and the group wanted a dance that both recreated some of the wildness of the dancing and frivolity that occurred in the early 1800s up on the dance stage in the tree, but also remembered the fiddler who was a French prisoner of war who sadly died just prior to repatriation to France. Many are said to have heard the sad melodic tones of a fiddle player where the mighty tree once stood since that time