On a grey January morning in a Somerset orchard, a group of about forty people are gathered around the oldest apple tree. Someone is banging a drum. Someone else is blowing a horn. The crowd sings an ancient chant, pours cider on the roots and hangs toast in the branches. They are wassailing — a midwinter ceremony to encourage a good harvest, with roots stretching back at least to the medieval period and possibly much further.
Fifteen years ago, this event might have attracted a handful of enthusiasts and a mildly bemused journalist. Today, it is sold out. The orchard's wassail now draws people from Bristol, Bath and London — many of them under forty, many of them encountering the tradition for the first time. Something is shifting in Britain's relationship with its folk heritage, and the shift is more profound than simple nostalgia.
What Is the Folk Tradition Revival?
The folk revival is not a single phenomenon. It encompasses a wide range of practices — music, dance, crafts, seasonal ceremonies and land-based skills — united by a connection to place, community and pre-industrial ways of life. Morris dancing, long associated in the public imagination with eccentric middle-aged men in white, is attracting younger dancers and new choreographic experimentation. Ceilidh nights — communal Scottish and Irish dances — have become regular events in city venues. Hedge-laying, a traditional countryside skill involving the training of hedgerow plants into living fences, has waiting lists for courses across the country.
"People aren't coming to these traditions looking for the past. They're coming looking for the kind of belonging the present doesn't seem to offer."
Why Now?
The timing of the folk revival is not coincidental. In a period characterised by rapid technological change, social atomisation and a pervasive sense of disconnection from both community and nature, the folk traditions offer something specific and rare: embodied practice in community with others, rooted in a particular place and season.
This is different from consuming culture — watching a show, listening to a playlist, scrolling through content. Folk practice requires physical presence, participation and often a degree of learning difficulty. You can't passively consume Morris dancing; you have to do it, badly at first, in front of other people. That awkwardness, that embodied effort, is part of what makes it feel real and therefore valuable in ways that passive cultural consumption does not.
The Folk Music Renaissance
Nowhere is the revival more visible than in music. The folk music scene in the UK has been quietly thriving for over a decade, driven partly by artists who have brought folk traditions into dialogue with contemporary sounds. Artists like Stick in the Wheel, Lankum, Lisa O'Neill and Olivia Chaney have developed substantial audiences that skew younger than traditional folk audiences have historically been.
The folk club — a traditional format in which musicians and audience members take turns to perform in an informal setting — has proved surprisingly resilient. Many cities have active folk clubs, often based in pubs, that draw audiences of all ages. The format's participatory quality — anyone can get up and sing — connects to the same impulse that drives the broader folk revival: the desire for active participation rather than passive consumption.
Folk Skills and the Land
Beyond music and dance, there is a growing interest in traditional land-based and craft skills: dry stone walling, thatching, coppicing, basketry, green woodworking, and the cultivation of heritage grain and vegetable varieties. These skills are increasingly framed not as heritage curiosities but as practical responses to ecological crisis — ways of managing land sustainably, reducing dependence on industrial processes and reconnecting with the seasonal rhythms that shaped human culture for millennia.
There is also a psychological dimension. Many people who have taken up these skills report that the quality of attention they require — slow, patient, physical, responsive to material — provides a form of rest from the fragmented, screen-mediated attention that dominates modern work and leisure. Hedge-laying, in this sense, is not just a conservation technique. It is a form of meditation.
Belonging in a Fractured World
What unites all these strands of the folk revival is a hunger for belonging — the sense of being part of something larger than yourself that has roots in a specific place and time. The traditions being revived are not merely historical artefacts; they are living practices that create community, mark seasons and give participants a sense of continuity with those who came before.
In a society that has become expert at producing wealth and poor at producing meaning, the folk revival asks a simple and challenging question: what did we lose when we became modern? The answer, for a growing number of Britons, seems to include things that matter quite a lot.