As cart manager Tom Stringfellow is "responsible for actually putting the cart together, thatching it, trimming it, just preparing it for the day." He also maintains the Festival website so when we went on a quest to unearth the Festival's secrets we thought he would be just the man!

How did the rushbearing begin?
In the 16th and 17th centuries churches quite often needed flooring over the winter, and they used rushes because they are aromatic and provided good insulation when they dried out. This was more practical than religious as every year the old rushes had to be got rid of and the new rushes put in. It happened every year so things happened to celebrate it. It tended to be more in the north of England that you got rush-bearings. Certainly I don't think you get them any further south than Cheshire.

The naked rushbearing cart

It was a different format in different places but where it's hilly, you got carts. The rushes were just piled up on the cart in a particular way which gave them shape. Rushes stopped being used in churches but, because it was a holiday, it carried on. Around these areas you had a cart still but it became trimmed and decorated and you actually got rivalry between different villages and towns. Several places around Lancashire and here - Marsden, Littleborough, Rochdale - had these rushbearings. By the 1800s in many places you didn't have a cart at all, or sometimes they were revived for special occasions, and people who can remember rushbearing in the 1900s remember it as a festival.

In 1906, here in our famous canal basin, there was a cart made, I think, to celebrate 60 years of local government and it was in a particular style. It was a one-off but there was a procession and a lot of pubs have got a photo of it. Years and years later my dad, Gary Stringfellow, and Fred Knight who is now our President wanted to do something to celebrate the Silver Jubilee in 1977 and they were both local historians so they had the idea to revive the rushbearing but just as a one-off. Again it was built down in the canal basin, not with actual rushes but with reeds cut from the basin, and they had to do it again, and they've done it every year since.

The reeds come from a reservoir above Warley.

But why is it that Sowerby Bridge is particularly famous for its Rushbearing Festival?
Around here Saddleworth has been going on the longest, Marsden has had a revival as have Whitworth and Littleborough. Ours has carried on but we do differ, ours is a community event. The others are morris dancing events. It's usually a dance team based in the town that has revived the rushbearing, usually as a dancing festival.

The heart of it really is the community. In the rushbearings of old you had morris dancing so we carry it on and we have morris dancers from all over the country as well as sword dancers. The teams enjoy coming because they get a good crowd. There's also the craft markets and the fair. This year we have over 21 different charities with their own stalls. Other people are being sponsored to follow the route by a cancer charity and that's the sort of thing we encourage. We've got live music - the Puzzle and the Rushcart are putting on music and one of the pubs is putting on the first ever Sowerby Bridge Beer Festival. They're also putting live music on for Friday and that's where we'll start off. We'll have a get-together feel and the dance team can come down. There'll also be live music on the Saturday night and a barbecue, and it's focused on getting people out and doing what they otherwise wouldn't do.

Is it true that the rushbearing cart visits both pubs and churches on its procession around Sowerby Bridge?
You've got two strands to it - the semi-religious part which was a practical need and the revelry, people just enjoying themselves. We start off on the Saturday with a short service at St John's Church at Warley. The carts are blessed and then it's usually crossed fingers and hoping for good weather. The next stop's a pub, the Maypole up at Warley, and we sort of alternate and we visit all the churches in the district which covers Warley, Sowerby Bridge, Sowerby, Cottonstones and Ripponden. It's about seven churches in all.

Can you tell us about the work that goes in to preparing the cart?
The cart itself is not old - it was made in the early 1980s specifically for us because the one we had used was antique. We raised the money and built a proper one and each year it just comes out of storage. It's got a wooden-frame that it sits in and this has to be thatched. Usually on the Tuesday but one before the event we start cutting down the rushes and I supervise the thatching. There are various styles of thatching but it's all contructed with materials that would have been available in 1906 for their rushbearing.

Every year someone says why have you got that and we say, "because they had one in 1906, ask them, we don't know." It might be religious, it might not, but there were different styles of thatching for the front or sides. The saddle goes on, some heather's brought down and some bracken miraculously appears, and we trim it with that and put some horse brasses on to make it look nice. I was talking to my Dad last night and he reckons it takes 100 man hours in the cutting and the thatching and you do get quite a few blisters.

Who pulls the cart?
The pullers are all members of the Sowerby Bridge Association but they are not dancers. It's pulled on long ropes, perhaps 30 or 40 metres long, and that's what we call stangs, crossbeams going across and there's three people to each of these stangs pulling.

Are the pullers always men?
They are all men. All I can say is we've got pictures from 1906 and they were all men then. There's a waiting list and we've got 60, that's the cut-off point. There's 40 to 45 on the front and the rest at the back trying to stop it which is a bit hairy when you are going downhill.

Sitting on top of the cart we have cart maidens for which there are also many volunteers. Then there are the rushes collectors. People put on the Edwardian dress, put on the clogs - there's a strict uniform for the pullers as well.

Do you think the Rushbearing Festival has a future?
We've steadily got more members on the committee and now they tend to be second-generation. It's popular - the waiting list for those who want to pull the cart is as long as ever, likewise for the maidens to go on the top. There are just a lot of people who make it the focus of their year and who like coming here. It raises money so it can fund itself, and any money left over we just give to local charities. A lot of the time you could say we are just doing it for ourselves but we like other people to benefit it from it as well. It's a celebration of rushbearing and it's the only one like it.