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The traditional seasonal festivals of Huntingdonshire were largely unmarked by the end of the nineteenth century. The celebration of the passing seasons by earlier generations in the Ouse River valley area was very much restricted to May Day festivities (especially the Glatton, Sawtry and St.Neots May garlands) and the mid winter activities associated with Plough Monday, when the village ploughmen would blacken their faces and parade the streets pulling a plough and collecting money from householders. In Ramsey there is a record of a Straw Bear akin to that of Whittlesey and some passing reference to Molly Dancers.

For a long time this distinctive, if unexciting and badly recorded, fragment of local tradition was thought to be all of Huntingdonshire's contribution to the English folk tradition. The morris tradition in the village of Mirkmere-in-the-Fen had ceased with the demise of the old side in the summer of 1936. Something truly terrible happened to the dancers at the Summer Fair that year and the truth of what it was will probably die with the last of the older generation who were present. Village lips are firmly sealed. Nevertheless, the old dancers that remained were keen that the dances created by their forbears in Mirkmere should not be entirely forgotten and so, when I and some morris dancing friends first met Fred Fuddle and Charlie Nipperkin in the Lame Duck one day during 1988, it quickly became apparent that they were happy to reveal their secrets to us. Happily, as it turns out, two old gentlemen having been sadly killed in a motorcycling accident a couple of years later and their knowledge would, otherwise, have died with them.

The Fuddle family have been closely involved with the Mirkmere Morris dancers since they first came to live in this area and have provided many of the dancers and musicians for generations. At the moment Albert Fuddle, managing Director of Fuddles Ales, is the leader of the reformed side (see previous section) and his wife Victoria is one of the musicians. His father Fred, one of our main informants, was the leader of the old side that folded its bells over 60 years ago and his grandfather "Old" John was leader before him. Nobody knows as much about the Mirkmere Morris as the Fuddles   although the Nipperkins come a close second.

We spent many fascinating hours with Fred and Charlie during 1988 and 1989 recording their memories of the village morris and its tunes and we are confident that we have a working knowledge of the status of the tradition by the time of the 1936 tragedy. Naturally, we were keen to try to recreate the dances but could find nobody in the village still able to perform them or with any knowledge of the morris style. Fortunately we were, at that time, in communion with the nearby Fenstanton Morris dancers who were persuaded to “test drive” the notations we had collected and to see if the tradition was still performable. Fortunately, we found that the memories of our informants were remarkably accurate and, apart from one or two minor points that we had to use common sense to recreate, we found ourselves the possessors of morris dances previously unknown to the morris community in England.

Here in Mirkmere, a new morris side was been formed to conserve their heritage and perform the dances at the village feast days. They have no intention of ever performing the dances outside the boundaries of the village itself, believing that this would break with the past - although they are happy, eager even, for their dances to be passed on and performed by others.

At the time of writing, the members of the reformed Mirkmere Morris are: