Duns Summer Festival

Bloggees have asked about the Duns Summer Festival and here is the bare bones from the Traditions of the Borders Website


The town's most important event is the Duns Summer Festival which started in 1949. This is held in July when the festival principals, the Reiver and Reiver's Lass, lead the Riding of the Bounds to the summit of Duns Law. there The Wynsome Mayde is chosen by the pupils of Duns Primary School and is crowned during the festival. There are also sports, concerts and parades.

As reported previously the principals: The Reiver and the Reiver's Lass have been chosen for 2008. Huttonian has yet to observe these festivities at close hand so will reserve judgement until he has. It just seems rather odd to an incomer to have a festival celebrating perhaps the greatest bunch of rogues to have ever infested these islands -a crew of murderous thieves, sheep stealers, cattle rustlers and outlaws who owed no allegiance except to their temporary paymasters -better disowned than romanticised I would have thought. Maydes in those days, in the aftermath of rape, kidnap and ransom, raddled with dreadful diseases, would hardly have been wynsome and possibly not much of a role model for Primary School children.

Ah How about Robin Hood? A sort of English Reiver perhaps. Well at least he appears to have had a code of honour-robbing the rich to benefit the poor; bringing back the 10p tax band, that sort of thing-an Old Labour figure and a Green one to boot given his environment.
I doubt if the Reivers went in for any such income redistribution unless it was strictly in their favour.

And no I am not displaying anti Scottish prejudice. There were English Reivers as well, just as awful, and both lots had not a jot of patriotic fervour to their name. Scottish Gold was as good as English silver any day and never mind the border.

I doubt if either side would have been welcome in 16th Century Duns.

Labels: Duns, Reivers, Summer Festival

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