page_title: Minehead Hobby Horse
section_title: Links with other customs
hierarchical_section_title: Minehead Hobby Horse / Links with other customs
caption_attribution_description: English: Padstow, Mayday 2009 (2) The town of Padstow in north Cornwall celebrates May Day each year with its famous 'Obby 'Oss Festival [1]. Two rival factions, the Old Oss (red livery) and the Blue Ribbon Oss (blue livery). In this view, the Blue Ribbon 'Oss (centre) has just emerged from the Padstow Institute.
context_page_description: In the coastal town of Minehead, located in the southwest English county of Somerset, there is a folk custom on May Day entailing the parading of a brightly decorated hobby horse around the locality.
  The origins of the custom are unknown. The earliest known record of the practice dates from 1830.
context_section_description: Minehead is located eighty miles away from the Cornish coastal town of Padstow, which has a similar May Day custom involving the procession of a hobby horse. The folklorist Christina Hole stated that while the Minehead hobby horse was different in design from that of Padstow, it was "no less impressive". In 1978, Cawte noted that the Minehead custom had "never been so fashionable" as its Padstow counterpart, and that as such it had received less research from folklorists and historians. He also reported that among Minehead locals there was a claim that the Padstow hobby horse had been created by Cornish sailors after they had observed that at Minehead.
  24 miles west of Minehead, in the North Devon coastal town of Combe Martin, a hobby horse custom was recorded as existing in the early nineteenth century but had apparently died out by 1837. In this custom, a procession traversed the town on Ascension Day; it included not only the Hobby Horse but also individuals dressed as grenadiers, a character identified as the fool and another as "the Early of Rone", as well as a real donkey. In the 1970s, Cawte reported that Minehead locals claimed that there had once been a rivalry between their hobby horse and that at Combe Martin, although he added that there was no corroborating evidence for the accuracy of such a claim.
caption: The Padstow 'Obby 'Oss
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