Halloween in England is not one thing. Before the American version flattened the calendar, individual villages kept their own nights, their own songs and their own vegetables. A few survive. The best of them is Punkie Night at Hinton St George in Somerset.
What happens
On the last Thursday in October, the children of the village process through the streets carrying punkies: lanterns carved from mangelwurzels, the huge cattle beet. The mangelwurzel is hollowed out, designs are cut through the sides, and a candle is set inside.
They call at houses and sing the Punkie song, and are given money or sweets. There is a competition for the best-carved punkie, and the whole thing is run with the seriousness a village applies to something it has done for a very long time.
Note the vegetable. Not a pumpkin — a mangelwurzel, which is a properly West Country choice and produces a lantern with a deep, ruddy glow quite unlike a pumpkin's cheerful orange. It is also, as anyone who has attempted one will confirm, brutally hard work to hollow out.
The story behind it
The tradition is said to have begun when the men of the village went off to Chiselborough Fair, a few miles away, and drank a great deal more than was wise. When they failed to come home, the women went out to fetch them — and, with a gale blowing that would have snuffed any open candle, hollowed out mangelwurzels to shelter the flames.
Whether that is history or a story the village tells about itself hardly matters. It has the right shape: a practical problem, a vegetable to hand, and a solution that outlived the occasion by a couple of centuries.
Why it matters
Punkie Night is evidence for the thing this site keeps insisting on: the lantern tradition in Britain is native, old, and not descended from pumpkins. Hinton St George was carving mangelwurzels long before anyone in Somerset had seen an American pumpkin lantern, and it is still doing it on its own date rather than on 31 October.
It sits alongside Hop-tu-Naa in the Isle of Man and Allantide in Cornwall as one of the surviving regional Halloweens — each with its own name, date and customs, and each older than the one on the shelves in the supermarket.
Going
It is a genuine village custom, not a ticketed attraction: a small Somerset village, a few hundred people, and children with beet lanterns. Treat it accordingly — go quietly, park considerately, buy something locally, and do not turn up expecting a scare maze.
If you would rather be frightened than charmed, our South West listings will sort you out.