Lustleigh May Day

Lustleigh May Day is usually held on the first Saturday in May. Schoolchildren elect one girl from the village as May Queen. She leads a procession through the village under a canopy of flowers carried by children, then returns to the rock throne in the Town Orchard to be crowned. There is maypole dancing, and morris dancing has long been part of the day. The children who take part are aged 5 to 15 and live in the village or have a local connection.

Cecil Torr, who lived at Wreyland, revived the ceremony in 1905, writing that there was a May Day festival there for which he was responsible. The first queens were Mabel Bunclarke in 1905 and Olive Chudley in 1906. Until 1940 the queen was crowned on a rock on the hill above Wreyland at Long Tor, now private land, and her name was carved on the rock. The ceremony lapsed after 1940 and returned in 1954 in the Town Orchard, where granite was blasted out to make a flat place for the maypole dancing. A new granite throne, carved from Blackenstone Quarry granite, was unveiled for the millennium, and queens' names from 1954 are carved on the boulder.

In the early years it was held on a weekday so that the schoolchildren could take part. The in-person event was cancelled in 2020 and a virtual May Day was held instead. The Lustleigh Society's history page and Wikipedia differ on small details, such as when the first rock stopped being used, and this follows the Society where they differ.