Description
This is a photograph (first published in the Northern Echo) of a very interesting pageant, held in Askrigg and Bainbridge, Wensleydale, North Yorkshire, in 1944.
We are very grateful to Karen Minnitt for sending us this photo. She writes: "the Pageant starts in the present time, i.e. 1944, and works backwards into the distant past linking to very localised history. There were two separate productions: one in Askrigg and one in Bainbridge, and the Bainbridge version included a different ending: ‘At Bainbridge a bugle now sounds up on the Hill and the Roman Camp episode concludes the Pageant’. My 91 year old mother says it involved an attack on the Roman fort. The local history covered within the Pageant includes: the arrival of the railway in Askrigg; the granting of a Market Charter in 1745; the murder of a Scottish Laird who was bearing a bag of money; a visit by John Wesley; the siege in Raydale by the Metcalfe clan; the monks of Fors Abbey, and the legend of Semerwater."