Fruit Routes Wassail Ceremony

Fruit Routes Wassail Ceremony - Loughborough University

To Wassail is to honour fruit trees and nature. The ceremony has many forms but its roots are pagan and essentially English. Here the Wassail is part of artist Anne-Marie Culhane's Fruit Routes work at Loughborough University with a newly planted orchard area being wassailed. The Wassail is performed by one of Ways of the Wyrd Border Morris who also performed music and modern Morris Dance including an Olympic Morris Dance.

The film was made by Paul Conneally entirely on an iPhone.

Fruit Routes is an artist led initiative that started in 2011 to develop the university grounds as an edible landscape anchored around fruit tree planting, increasing the foraging opportunities on campus and sharing knowledge with the university and wider community through events, participation and mapping. Fruit Routes aims to create a legacy of several hundred fruit trees on site which will bear fruit for years to come for people to harvest, share and enjoy.

Fruit Routes was conceived by Anne-Marie Culhane and is supported by the Sustainability Team at Loughborough University and is in partnership with the Landscaping Our Society Group.

Fruit Routes Artists Include: Miriam Keye, Paul Conneally, Jo Salter, David Blayze, Ways of the Wyrd Border Morris, Bob Levene, Stephen Watts, Gillian Whiteley

Fruit Routes sends out a big thanks to: the Landscaping Our Society (now called The Landscaping and Gardening Society) team, the tireless LU staff Karen, Mark and Amy and student volunteer Laura Senior.