A Disgorging Head
Ralf Webb | Tolka Issue Eight, July 2025
People lose their minds on the first hot day of the year. This is a truth unique to these islands. Men strip off and light up in petrol station forecourts. Office workers on lunch break collapse face down in the grass. It’s a kind of domestic apostasy. Sun madness. Chlorophyllous delirium. One spends half the year holed up in damp-ridden, poorly insulated lodgings that the sudden promise of warmth, a super hit of vitamin D, engenders a state of temporary insanity so acute that it might merit as a legal defence. Things, in essence, get weird. Something like this seems to be happening in Wiltshire’s Bradford-on-Avon, where, on an unexpectedly sweltering mid-May afternoon, in the region of four hundred Morris dancers have descended, carrying percussion sticks, dulled swords and polka-dotted handkerchiefs to help celebrate the community’s seventh annual Green Man Festival.
Bradford-on-Avon is set in a valley on the edge of the Cotswolds. It’s the kind of charming West Country town where noticeboards are pinned with fliers from the amateur dramatics society and free houses are full of storybook characters given to long, cider-pickled anecdotes. Clothiers’ mansions and rows of honey-coloured weavers’ cottages rise in stacked terraces. A chapel and one-time hermitage, perched on the valley lip, gives panoramic views over the surrounding countryside: woods, fields and farmland, a rural landscape where widowers raise chickens, then write the names of each bird, in pencil, on their respective eggs. Despite the town’s size, its narrow roads are consistently congested. Straddling both the River Avon and Wiltshire–Somerset county line, Bradford, or ‘Boa’, is a vital crossing place for commuters, school-run SUVs and delivery vehicles alike, so that when the river frequently floods and shuts down the main bridge the town goes static, seems to slide back into an earlier expression of itself, that before-time children like to call ‘the olden days’.
Today, at the Green Man Festival, families have poured in from the wider parish, from neighbouring villages and towns – Bath and Warminster and Frome and Trowbridge – to take part in the festivities. I have come down from Bristol on one of England’s most expensive per-mile train journeys, with the express purpose of gathering material while having some good, clean, folkish fun. It’s not in short supply. The Morris dancers, over forty individual groups, have occupied the town centre, hidden in the shade of the former cloth mill, in the train station car park, in front of the deserted River Spice Indian restaurant, even outside the funeral directors, its doorway warped by recent flooding. Some perform to crowds of onlookers, others to no one at all – there are simply too many of them – before alternating places according to an intuitive logic. Their constant presence, scored by jangling ankle bells and the nervy knocking together of sticks, provides an edgy aural texture to the day’s proceedings, pitched somewhere between quaint and eerie, entirely appropriate for a community festival that has smooshed together a whole host of weird rural customs and traditions under the Green Man aegis.
The town, in fact, has transformed into a living museum for all things British folk. In addition to the Morris dancers, I come across mummers players, a kind of street pantomime or masquerade with medieval origins, in which badly costumed performers, mounted on hobby horses, act out ad-libbed stories appertaining to Saint George, dragons and evil knights, backed by a small band of concertinas and fiddlers whose strings have slackened in the unexpected heat. Weaving in and out of sweaty crowds, the groups of mummers and dancers, I see several men dressed in janky, homemade animal costumes – a crow, a boar and a fox among them – crying and yawping, delighting and disturbing children in equal measure. A septuagenarian in flowing gowns leads the pack, clutching a huge wooden staff studded with dozens of real ale bottle caps, his face painted apple green: the Green Man come to life, the curator of this living museum. His attaché of costumed forest animals, I later learn, are known as ‘ganderflankers’, which means something like ‘troublemaker’ in old Wilts dialect. The festival’s main event, insistently advertised on postered timetables, will be a parade led by Jack in the Green, a man situated beneath a gigantic conical frame woven with vines, leaves and other foliage. This will culminate at the medieval Tithe Barn, with ‘the Stripping’. I ask a steward at the information booth what, exactly, this final item on the agenda involves. He seems bemused, a little guarded, as though I’ve asked him a trick question. The stripping, he explains, is when the townspeople will tear the foliage from Jack. It is important, he goes on, his eyes becoming bright and eager, that everyone present takes part in this ritual and keep hold of the stripped leaves. It will ensure a good summer.
The festival also honours the more recognisable tradition of commerce and trade: the market. There are dozens of stalls, spread throughout the town hall’s sun-trap carpark, selling hand-painted tin mugs, amateur ceramics and other cutesy tat. The market sprawls into the grounds of the Holy Trinity church, where the freshly mowed lawn glows lime green in the sunlight, patchouli scent rising from incense sticks plugged into the soil. Here, the stalls are more eccentric. Healing crystals, olive soap and talismanic pendants are for sale, with one marquee, set back from the throng, offering ‘esoterica for the discerning’: pamphlets and literature on crop circles, spiritualism and Ley lines, as well as models and posters of those two prominent, ancient icons of fertility, the Venus of Willendorf (statuette of a well-endowed woman) and the Cerne Abbas Giant (hill figure with a hard-on). This vendor is something of a clothes horse, too. On a rail are dozens of Fruit of the Loom T-shirts at ten pound a pop, screen printed with Celtic labyrinths, stone circles and medieval miniatures, which accidentally ape a number of luxury streetwear designers – brands like Heresy and Aries – that have found folk iconography and motifs to be an alluring aesthetic among SSENSE-shopping Brits.
I consider copping a tee – they’re pretty nice. But the cotton’s infused with the sour tang of old smoke, some kind of skunk, I think, giving rise to an olfactory memory, one synonymous with fear, panic, paranoia, dissociation: getting high by burial mounds, bad trips in dark woods, whiteys under a fuzzy moon, a merry-go-round of al fresco inebriation that typifies the teenage years of many small-town millennials. Fortunately, the vendor doesn’t cajole me into making a purchase; I don’t think he’s even noticed me, engaged as he is in conversation with another patron. They’re talking about the meat industry, spitballing woo-woo theories. Like, what if industrial meat farming is not merely analogous to but, in fact, proof of the existence of a ‘hell realm’? What if the animals there are reincarnated beings, punished for some crime of the soul committed in an earlier life? What would that make the humans who work in the slaughterhouses and abattoirs? What would that make meat eaters?
As if on cue, the procession of costumed animals maraud through the market, led by the Green Man. One of these ganderflankers stops right beside me as he passes, a figure in an oversize boar’s head replete with a protruding snout and tinfoil tusks. His pointed ears even seem to pivot, slightly, at the T-shirt vendor’s talk of animal flesh. Such commitment to masquerade is disconcerting. I can’t see through the beekeeper’s mesh mask; there’s scarcely the suggestion of a human face there. On instinct, I reach for my phone to take a picture, or to ask the boar for a selfie, something to reground myself in the ordinary, banal present. Before I can, the Green Man, that master of ceremonies, calls out to the boar, summoning him. Evidently, they have places to go. They have things to do. The boar rushes to catch up with his warden, who stands at the graveyard gates, hazed by incense smoke, sunlight glinting off the bottle caps on his hefty staff, unsmiling and domineering, a man with fantastic and unsettling plans.
*
Like many born-and-raised ruralites, I have an affinity with the iconography of ‘weird’ British folklore. This might, in fact, be an inevitability for those of us who grew up in the West Country, a quarter tank of petrol from Stonehenge, Avebury and Glastonbury combined, that trio of spiritually significant historical sites – stamped with National Trust-cum-English Heritage seals of approval – whose attendant mysteries and legends lend spooky substance to the wider national identity. Crystal shops, holy springs, moody picnics in stone circles: in these places, we felt – we, perhaps, still feel – an acute connection to an imagined past. We look at the floodplains and rolling fields and see misty woodland, runic script, druids and knights. And the green man is there, too, emerging through the thickets of this dreamworld, this ‘ancient’ England, a place suspended between history, myth and make-believe.
Who is this green man? His prominence is demonstrated by countless pubs and inns adopting his namesake, adorning their signs with his leafy visage – a very English kind of canonisation. In our minds, the green man is allied with paganism and Arthurian legend. According to a framed poster on the wall of my childhood kitchen, the green man represents a ‘pre-patriarchal image of male spirituality’. We feel sure that the green man is an ancient icon, even if indicative instances of green men are most commonly found carved in stone, on the eaves of medieval churches, on chancel arches or beautifully sculpted into the oak of misericords (so-called ‘mercy seats’ designed to offer fleeting comfort to congregants during hours-long acts of prayer). And we are absolutely certain that the green man represents a commingling of flesh, blood and bone with foliage – a connection between the human and the natural world.
Most frequently, the green man is represented as a recognisably human face surrounded by or bearded with leaves. In other variants, the separation between human and non-human is less clear. Leaves are given facial features, for instance. Or a man’s head will be shown with vegetation growing from the throat, the eyes, ears and nostrils, open-mouthed grin permanently fixed in an expression of horrific ecstasy. In these versions, it is as though human innards have been transformed into an overabundance of verdure and herbage which has nowhere else to go but out: a representation, surely, of decay, regeneration and the orgiastic release we hope will attend death. Or, perhaps, an illustration of some malignant growth hidden within, something that cannot be suppressed or contained, and so spews forth, heralding rot. It is this latter version – sometimes known as the ‘Disgorging Head’ – that the good people of Bradford-on-Avon have chosen to adorn this year’s festival regalia: flags, posters, banners and pin badges all plastered with a face in mischievous rapture, leafed stems gushing from his lips.
The assertion that all these green men belong to the same taxonomic rank was first made in a 1939 essay by Lady Raglan, one half of an amateur folklorist, aristocratic power couple (her husband, the 4th Baron Raglan, wrote The Hero, which proposed that the stories of Western mythic heroes tend toward a common, recurrent pattern). In Lady Raglan’s ‘The Green Man in Church Architecture’, published in the still-extant Folklore journal, she suggests that green men found in churches across England, known then as foliate heads, represent the same individual figure. This figure, she claims, has roots in pan-European, pre-Christian fertility rituals of the kind described by James Frazer in The Golden Bough (a work of speculative anthropology which cast a long shadow over subsequent cultural production, and whose eclectic list of admirers include T. S. Eliot, Camille Paglia and the despotic Colonel Kurtz of Apocalypse Now). In these ancient fertility rituals, Frazer argued, a man from the community would be chosen to represent or embody a god and then sacrificed, often by decapitation, with the severed head placed in a sacred tree. Raglan submits that the green man – whom she sees as synonymous with the King of May, Robin Hood and Jack in the Green – is a direct descendant of such rituals.
In effect, Raglan proposes that pre-Christian fertility rites in Britain have left an evergreen impression in the cultural memory, reified in the green man icon and its variants. By doing so, Raglan attempted to forge a connection between modern Britain and an ‘original’ version of British culture, one whose ancientness confers it with authenticity and venerability, one that implies the British people had and still might have a spiritual or mystical relationship to the land. While this thesis may not have been expressly nationalistic – like the contemporaneous blood and soil ideology dispensed through Nazi Germany’s Völkisch nationalism project – it was implicitly so. Its identification of a putatively ‘native’ and indirectly rural tradition, issued just as the country was set to declare war, offered to distil or give new strength and clarity to British national identity.
Conjuring such a historical memory may, for Raglan, have been a mere impulse – a daydream of the imperialist, idle rich – but another, present-day green man aficionado does so with rather more intent. In a 2012 essay titled ‘The Old Yoke’, writer Paul Kingsnorth – a self-described ‘reactionary radical’ whose belief system hinges on ‘connection to land, nature and heritage’ – offers a different, equally speculative theory as to the green man’s origins. He suggests that the green man in church architecture may be a form of subversive art. After the Norman invasion, he argues, the English levelled a guerrilla insurgency campaign against their conquerors. These fighters – camouflaged in the trees – were apparently labelled ‘silvatici’, or ‘men of the woods’. Embittered English stonemasons hired to build Norman churches, Kingsnorth wonders, might have used the green man motif as a form of trojan protest: carving foliate heads into the architecture in order to bring ‘the spirit of the silvatici into the temple of the enemy’.
Kingsnorth recounts his green man origin story in order to convey a fantasy notion about English–British identity. In the piece, he is eager to ask what England–Britain would look like if not for the Norman conquest, insinuating that a forever Anglo-Saxon nation would have made for a preferable society to the one we have today. His dalliance with alternative history makes coded appeals to the possibility of a correct and ‘indigenous’ form of Englishness, one unspoilt by the corrupting influence of foreign invaders. This mirrors – and therefore buttresses – thinking espoused elsewhere in Kingsnorth’s writing: the existence of a ‘true’ English culture which needs safeguarding against globalism, something he positions, consciously if subtly, as synonymous with multiculturalism. The ideological undercurrent of Kingsnorth’s green man theory almost slips by unnoticed, only he can’t resist taking a potshot at the ‘good post-colonialists’ of the academies, whose talk of ‘integration and migration’ he blames for making ‘unfashionable’ such nativistic flights of fancy as his.
If the nativist bent in ‘The Old Yoke’ is somewhat concealed, it was made clear in Kingsnorth’s infamous ‘Elysium Found?’ essay, which he wrote and published as a response to a 2017 documentary film, Arcadia, and promptly scrubbed from the internet after receiving backlash. Arcadia juxtaposes found footage of rural British folk, fringe and establishment customs – fêtes, Morris dancing, fox hunts, village boule, lamb shearing and the like – in a blotter-paper-like visual collage, set to a score that cuts between distorted guitars, pulsating synth and haunting folk standards. The effect on the viewer is to make them feel something like they’re hallucinating in the woods, at night, in an illegal rave, suffering pareidolia, seeing faces in the trees – i.e., it is nightmarish, albeit in a mind-expanding sort of way. Kingsnorth, however, felt something else after watching the film. It inspired in him a ‘surge’ of patriotism, ‘the real kind, the old kind’. A patriotism attached to an ‘aboriginal Britain’, an intensely loaded phrase that seems designed to troll the post-colonialist academics Kingsnorth so despises, while genuinely attempting to deposit in readers’ minds the idea that such a place not only existed but should be venerated, even reclaimed. It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to see how a call for pride of ‘aboriginal’ Englishness is congruent with a call for a racially homogenous nation state: the very essence of fascism, the malignant growth hidden within, lodged in the back of the patriot’s throat, eager to burst forth and overwhelm everything human and humane.
*
I’m bounding through long grass toward a stretch of shaded wood, a secret place bordering the Boat Club by the banks of the river, screened by brambles and weeds, a place no one will find me, where no one will follow, a place of preternatural greenness. The hour is getting late; it’s almost time to strip Jack, but I really have to piss. The three Portaloos that the Green Man Festival committee saw fit to install outside the Tithe Barn are, as one might imagine, insufficient. A queue perhaps two dozen deep has formed. Ducking into the woods was a bad move, though: my bare legs are on fire, bloodied by bramble cuts, covered in welts from nettle stings, a sobering pain that jolts me into a sudden awareness of my body. I’m hot, I stink, I’m pinpricked with sweat, there’s a gnat caught in my throat, I’ve spent at least five hours in direct sunlight, without a cap, without lotion – ‘gathering material’ – a glassy ache has formed behind my eyes, and all other available evidence suggests I am extremely dehydrated.
So, before racing back to the barn to watch Jack get stripped, I stop at a little café, concealed within a small cluster of artisanal workshops, the barn’s outbuildings, hoping to refill my Nalgene BPA-free ‘Woodsman’ water bottle. But I’m met with yet another queue, it’s not even moving, stalled by a sticky-fingered kid at the front who throws a tantrum because his evidently overheated mother won’t buy him a piece of cake. The air is very close in the café. Blue bottles pester one of the waitresses. I can feel the pulsing of a vein on my temple. I can smell the musk of the man in front of me. He’s six foot tall, in a black shirt and jeans, black suspenders, bushy bearded, his top hat pinned with a faux-fox tail and pheasant feathers. One of the Morris dancers. There’s some confusion at the till, a new waitress back from break thinks I’m first in line. I’m too hot to care about queueing etiquette and so edge ahead to ask for tap water, but the Morris dancer is having none of it. He hits the waitress with a sickly, put-on baby-talk voice – ‘Oh, I have been awfully patient, oh, I have been awfully good’ – which makes me instantly hate him, even before he turns to glare at me, his sweaty face pancaked in black paint, a mere slick of white streaked beneath his eyes.
While I’m waiting, some gonzo impulse prompts me to google the name of his dance troupe, proudly printed on his T-shirt. I pull up the website. The homepage says that, as of 2021, the troupe will ‘no longer be sporting fully black faces’ as they ‘do not wish to offend’. And, yet, the website is filled with photos of dancers, many of them men, many of them sporting ‘fully black faces’. Blurred photos. Dancing in graveyards, outside manor houses, on high streets, even among solar farms, smiling, grinning, holding fire-lit torches, fingering flutes, drinking from pewter tankards. I look from the screen to the man in front of me, with his pot of Earl Grey and crumpets, and that thin band of white across the bridge of his nose seems such an insincere gesture, a concession, affected piety or even bait, an attempt to arouse antagonism from bystanders while maintaining plausible deniability. After all, he is not technically in ‘fully black face’. This interpretation, I feel, is either a moment of profound insight – I’ve intimated something, some essential truth, some base reality, the seething, barely suppressed, racially driven conservatism at the heart of the country that attends the taking of toast and tea in rural localities all across these lands – or else, it’s an effort to validate and justify my instinctual, self-serving hatred toward this man, a projection, some emotive distortion induced by the heat.
Rushing to the Tithe Barn, I pass a few ganderflankers in a state of undress, half-hidden in the bushes.They’re shedding their animal skins, returning to civvies, sets of stick-and-twine bird’s wings cast down to the grass. I guess they want to strip Jack, too, and perhaps this is a privilege reserved for those of us in the human realm. I offer the half-crow half-man an awkward wave and he looks at me as though I am completely insane to have even acknowledged him, and so I keep going, legs burning, head pounding, and reach the barn. That master of ceremonies, the Green Man, is standing on a footstool with a miniature megaphone, still in his guise. He’s asking the hundreds of onlookers to gather round, to come in close, striking a note of mawkish solemnity, for the ceremony is about to begin. Jack in the Green, shot of whatever volunteer had been scuttling it around all day, stands empty and still in the gravel. As a sculpture, Jack is extraordinary: enormous, tightly threaded with ivy, fir and green ribbons, wearing a hand-crafted papier-mâché mask with felt leaves and enormous, dewy eyes.
The Green Man yells and holds his staff aloft. The time is now. The time is here. At once a crowd of several hundred festival-goers swarm Jack. It’s not the twee, orderly procession I’d anticipated. People are barging against each other, really pushing in, screaming, shouting. The bratty kid from the café appears to have been hurled at Jack’s head. He holds on fast, yanks a great branch and raises it victoriously toward the sun. I had planned to stay outside the throng and observe, but I can’t. I’m impelled to join, taking one step toward the morass and getting sucked in. There’s a swirl of faces – kids, teens, parents, senior citizens – glimpses of expressions of mania, an atavistic desire for violence, then pure joy, happiness, wonderment and, suddenly, I’m face to face with Jack. He’s already half-stripped, the wicker showing through the greenery like some flesh-picked ribcage, and I stretch and grab at the structure before the crowd spits me back out, dizzied, clutching a single small ivy leaf shaped like a heart. No more than five minutes hence, the thing is finished, leaving a bare wooden frame, the mask knocked sideways, Jack’s humongous eyes soliciting pity.
Stripping Jack, as a ceremony, performs the opposite of whatever the Disgorging Head illustrates. Rather than a glut of greenery gushing outward to envelope a human form, we have, instead, denuded a figure of greenery, robbed it of its organic matter. We are told to keep hold of these leaves and vines – to keep them safe – an essential part of the ceremony that will ensure the seamless progression of the seasons, usher in a good summer and an abundant harvest. In effect, we are asked to internalise them, to integrate these strips and shreds of foliage into our lives, to stow them between the pages of a paperback, perhaps, or file them in a desk drawer with other bits of ephemera. Over time, diminished by ordinary existence, they will cease to signify anything at all. We will forget why we ever thought to keep hold of them in the first place. And memory is pliable, eager to be shaped, eager to be restored and given the irrefutable prestige of history. The kid from the café chases his mother, through the dispersing crowd, and past the barn to Barton Bridge, trailing the branch he snatched from Jack. Then he drops it into the water, at that slight crook by the pillbox, where old timers like to fish in fair weather.
Ralf Webb is the author of the poetry collections Rotten Days in Late Summer (2021) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and Highway Cottage (2025). He is also author of
the non-fiction book Strange Relations, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. His poems, essays, and fiction have appeared widely, including in the London Review of Books, Fantastic Man, Granta and the Guardian.
‘A Disgorging Head’ was first published in Issue Eight of Tolka (November 2024). You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
