The event was great fun. It was held in a valley with a large fast flowing river in. Last year the valley was burnt, and has left a rich abundance of flowers and resprouting trees, with birds everywhere singing to the lovely weather we were blessed with. The Gough possee arrived in the truck on the Monday before, with one small big top (can you say that?), others turned up with a field kitchen, and more still with the sound system. All was up and ready to go by Monday evening and we sat around the fire and caught up with some gossip and drinking some beers, with Jase, who had arrived with Melissa a good ten hours later than planned due to a 5 day stag night, and a dodgy hose on the car, bless 'em!
The happy couple had been pelted with rice at least twice before the ceremony started at about really hot o'clock under a large spreading olive tree, and although the background noise of hunger and pre-celebrations were fairly loud, Karen managed to maintain poise enough to say some opening words on the occasion, and on the nature of Beltane. Melissa said some words which were getting even harder to hear by this point. Both of them looked radiant, none the less. Chris tried to get some best man words in edgeways against the now fairly rowdy few hecklers who had lost(?) the ability to string more than one syllable together. The whole ceremony was very smiley, probably helped by the ceremonial sangria, which I unfortunately missed. It appears a fairly large amount of Brandy went into it, and tasted completely innocent (as a good cocktail should).
Once the words were done with, there was fire jumping to be done. Just before the meat had been removed from the kitchen fire, some kind hearted soul had lit another fire near the olive tree. With only a moments hesitation Jason & Melissa proceeded to jump both fires, remembering fortunately at the last moment, not to have Fox holding on to the train!
The music commenced shortly afterwards and much dancing and merriment followed late into the night. Jason & Melissa did a great "our tunes" session on the decks going back over loads of lovely old memories.
Little did we know the ceremony was to last for three more days....