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The Fairs
and related events

News
October 2007
Another page of photos added - from East Bergholt and Rougham 1980 (we think), courtesy of Madeline Lees. Can you identify any of the people?
February 2006
The Lowestoft branch of the Suffolk County Records Office is keen to give a home to a fairs archive. A gathering point is being arranged to take in the material which will form the archive. Contact us if you have anything to contribute.

And here's a couple more galleries of photos, courtesy of the mysterious Martin H.
To give you a taste of things to come here's some roughs - 'digital contact sheets'. Martin is working his way through them producing quality versions.

Here's a list of the summer fairs, faires and fayres, year by year. Then associated items: the winter events, the community paper, the books generated by the fairs and writings from them.

New - Nov 2005 -
Photo gallery
Poster gallery

1972.
Barsham Faire - Roos Hall, Beccles

1973.
Barsham Faire - Rectory Paddock, Barsham

1974.
Barsham Faire - Rectory Paddock, Barsham

1975.
Barsham Faire - Rectory Paddock, Barsham

1976.
Bungay May Fair - Mettingham Castle, Bungay
Barsham Faire - Rectory Paddock, Barsham

1977.
Jubilee Bungay May Fair - Mettingham Castle, Bungay
The Dome at the Eye Show

The Coypu Show

Albion Fairs formed

1978.
Albion Fair at Oaksmere
Downham Market
Blundeston
Wildream Fair - Bramfield
Mistletoe Fair - Thornham Magna
Rougham Tree Fair
Dragon Hill - Eye

The Warp at the ICA

1979.
Albion Fair at Oaksmere
Fantasy Fair - Lyng
Fire Fair - East Bergholt
Rougham Tree Fair

Dome put up at Glastonbury, Coypu Liberation Army to Hood Fair

1980.

Ariel Fair - Herringfleet Heights
Sun Fair - Lyng
Moon Fair - East Bergholt
Rougham Tree Fair
Follye Fayre - Heveningham

1981.
Albion Fair - Oaksmere
Green Fair - Blythburgh
Faerie Fair - Lyng
Rainbow Fair - East Bergholt
Alby Fair
Follye Fayre - Heveningham
Rougham Harvest Fair

1982.
Green Fair - Outney Commmon, Bungay
Albion Kids Fair - Oaksmere
Faerie Fair - Lyng
Pure Energy Fair - Westleton
Earth Fair - East Bergholt
Fire & Water Fair - Bayfield Nr Holt
Rougham Tree Fair
Follye Fayre - Heveningham
I think Wagtail Fair at Narbeth was this year

1983
Thornham Magna.
Castle Fair - New Buckenham

1984
Green Deserts fair - Thorpe Woodlands, Thetford Forest

(There was another one day fair near Thetford - that was 1985 or 6 or maybe even later! Again likely Green Deserts.)


1985
Wool Fair - Stowmarket 15th and 16th June

1986
Great Desert Fair - Roos Hall, Barsham

Autumn until Spring Village and town halls rather than fields

The Waveney Clarion the community paper started with some of the profits of the first Barsham

Coypu Comix

Build Another Barsham

The Sun in the East

EAAT Activities (p 10)
Barsham - the Once and Future Faire (p 16-17)
Incubus (p 22-23)
Return to Bungay Fair (p 26-27)
A Tale of Bungay May Fair (p 31)
View from the Ground (p 68-71)
A Wink and a Bit o' French (p 80-81)
A Musician Talks (p89 - 90)
Vikings and Others (p97-98)
A Letter from Desmond Fairybreath (p 118-119)
Bruce Lacey - an Interview (p126-129)
The Time, the Place and the People (p 134)

A reading list on festivals

Website updates

Links

Guestbook - what's been written

gypsy wagons at Rougham

'Fairs are people, pleasure and spectacle combined. They are the oldest, liveliest and most unaffected form of public entertainment....
From earliest times merchants and strolling players foregathered at prescribed trading fairs throughout the world. Although more often held in towns and villages, these fairs were sometimes set up in bleak, inhospitable places like the hilltop intersections of ancient trackways or, in enactment of pagan rites, on remote burial grounds. The strange converging of huddles of carts and vans, the wretched animals employed to draw them and the parasitic bands of cheap jacks and mountebanks gave little indication of the brightness spontaneity, wit and pathos, about to burst upon the scene.'
(David Braithwaite, `Travelling Fairs' - Shire Publications.)

Wildream Fair - poster

DRAGON HILL

Morning breaking it is
making nonsense
of all the meanness on earth.

Most dawns don't come
yellow like that
and the flints in the tower of Eye church
blazed back at the sky.

Around a campfire that had burned all night
we sat, the ashblond girl with the wailing child
with eczema, the strange boy from Cambridge
me and the tea-pot -

shoulder to shoulder and smokey-eyed we were
like desperadoes, cornered
some longago morning.

AB

Rougham Tree Fair 1982 - poster

The Sun in the East - front cover

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