Your narrator is Derfel Cadarn – a member of Arthur's war band and Bard to Merlin – enjoy the tale and lap up the atmosphere!"

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Ye Olde Beltane Eve

Beltane greets the new summer and on the eve of the feast we let all the fires in the village die. The kitchen fires, that had burned all winter long, went unfed for the day and so by nighttime they were nothing but embers. We raked them out, swept the hearths clean, then laid new fires, while on a hill to the east of the village we heaped two great piles of firewood, one of them stacked about the sacred tree that Merlin, our Druid, had selected. It was a young Hazel that we had cut down and carried ceremoniously through the village, across the stream and up the hill. We hung the tree with scraps of cloth, and all the houses, like the hall itself, were decked with new young Hazel boughs.

That night, all across Britain, the fires were dead. On Beltane Eve the darkness rules. The feast was laid out in the hall, but there was no fire to cook it and no flame to light the high rafters. There was no light anywhere, except in those towns where Christians (spits to avert evil) defied the great God Bel and lit treacherous fires to insult him. But here in the countryside, the Pagan countryside, we made sure that all was dark in Bel's honour.

At dusk we climbed the hill, a mass of villagers and spearmen driving cattle and sheep that were folded into wattle enclosures. Children played, but once the great dark fell the smallest of them fell asleep and their little bodies lay in the grass as the rest of us gathered about the unlit fires and sang the "Lament of Annwn".

Then, in the darkest part of the night, we made the new summer's fire. Merlin made the flame by rubbing two sticks, while Issa, my head spearman, dribbled shavings of larch-wood kindling onto the spark that gave off a tiny wisp of smoke. The two men stooped to the tiny flame, blew on it, added more kindling, and at last a strong flame leapt up and all of us began to sing the "Chant of Belenus" as Merlin carried the new fire to the heaps of firewood. The sleeping children awoke and ran to find parents as the Beltane fires sprang high and bright.

A goat was sacrificed once the fires were burning. As ever Ceinwyn, my wife, could not bear to watch and so turned away as the poor beasts throat was cut and Merlin scattered its blood on the grass so that he could find omens in the pattern that the sacrificial blood had formed. He then tossed the carcass onto the fire where the sacred Hazel now burned, and then the villagers fetched their cattle and sheep and drove them between the great blazes. We hung plaited straw collars about the cows’ necks, and then watched as young women danced between the fires to seek the blessings of Bel on their wombs. They had done this at Imbolc too, but it was always repeated at Beltane. This was the first year that my daughter Morwenna was old enough to dance the fires and Arthur smiled at me as she twirled and leapt - for at the equinox she and his son, Gwydre, would be handfasted, so joining our two families more formally than our lifelong friendship could. I turned around and looked to the horizon and could see the bright flames of all the other Beltane fires burning in the distance. All over Wessex the fires were being lit in honour of the sun God - and I wondered how many more Beltane's we would enjoy before we once again had to fight the Saxons.

My spearmen had brought two huge iron cauldrons filled with wood and each family took a piece, lit it upon the great fire and than ran down to their huts and homes to light their kitchen fire so that every fire in the village, that would burn until Samhain when we repeated the ritual, would have come from the fire of Bel himself. When every home had its fire we went to the hall and there lit the fire that would roast the coming feast for us. By now it was nearly dawn and so we crowded into the palisade to wait for Bel.

The instant that his first shaft showed above the eastern horizon we burst into a joyous song - the song of Lugh's birth and we danced as we sang, and as we sang Merlin called upon the Gods and the Elements to preserve and bless our village and the Sacred Island of Britain. We faced Bel once more as his warming rays lit the new day and heralded the start of summer and together the whole village offered up their prayers to him.

Then we began to cook. Arthur and I had agreed that it should be a huge feast for we did not know when the Saxons would come again and so we wanted to give the people a memory worth fighting for. So we had prepared five deer, two boars, three pigs, six sheep, ten baskets of fresh bread baked on the old season's fires and several barrels of mead. There was cheese and nuts and for the children we had baked little cakes with Bel's symbol, a five-pointed star, scorched onto their crusts.

As the meal cooked, the villagers played games. There were pony races, wrestling matches and a competition to see who could lift the heaviest weight. The girls wove flowers into chains, which they then wore on their heads, and, long before the feat had begun I saw young couples begin to slip off into the woods. We ate in the afternoon – as we feasted, the Bards and poets recited their work and the success of their compositions was judged by the length of the applause that each generated. I gave them all presents, even the bad ones and there were plenty of those!

Most of the poets were young men who had blushed as they had recited some ode to a village girl who had taken their fancy, and the villagers laughed and jeered and then demanded that the girl referred to reward the poet with a kiss. If the kiss was deemed too fleeting they would hold boy and girl together and make them kiss properly.

I drank too much. Indeed we all ate well and drank better. I was challenged to a wrestling match with a farmer friend and the crowd demanded that I accept and so, half drunk already, I clapped my hands on his shoulders and he did the same to me. I could see in his eyes that he was drunk - he could see that I was too and so instead of wrestling we smiled, embracing as only friends can, and then wobbled before toppling over and rolling down the hill in one another’s arms. Somehow we dragged ourselves up again, only to be rewarded by jeers and catcalls for our poor performance.

By nightfall I was very mead-fuddled and Ceinwyn linked her arm through mine, kissed me and said, "Lord Derfel Cadarn, I do believe that you are drunk!"

"I am that my Lady" I answered.

"You will sleep like a Hog and snore like one too" she chided.