The Long Dance

What it looks like, and what it does

A moonlit meadow. A ring of pale dancers hand in hand in old-fashioned clothes, feet barely touching the grass, a fiddle playing from nowhere. A modern coat hung on a gatepost. Bare feet in the grass at the ring's edge.

Gathers at dusk on Midsummer Eve. Dances until the first light. Leaves the grass pressed in a perfect ring.

What is known

The Ring at Cold Ashton has been recorded in parish accounts since 1347, always on one night. Villagers watch from the lane and do not enter.

Those who dance report an evening. They come home into the next morning, or the next week. None has returned after a year. They say the dance had no seams.

What it can do

• Draws willing participants into the dance
• Suspends the passage of time for the dancers

Where it stops

• Appears only on midsummer night
• Cannot take anyone who declines the first invitation

An encounter

Pryce took the hand offered at the edge of the ring and danced what felt like one tune. When she let go it was morning, a Tuesday, three days later. She wrote “Joined, was warm, would again” in her walking diary. The dancer on her left, she noted, had her hands, but not her voice.

Rowan Pryce, hiker, The Ring, Cold Ashton, Midsummer Eve

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Parish accounts record 211 returns after dancing, with absences of one to seven days.
• rumor: That each person who joins takes the place of someone who leaves.
• incomplete: The count of dancers in aerial photographs from three summers is consistently 36.

Still unresolved

The register of those who danced and returned lists 211 names over seven centuries. The ring is always the same size.

Where it has been recorded

• Cold Ashton (confirmed) — Recorded by Rowan Pryce, hiker.

Stories about it

• The Long Dance at Midsummer (Entity story, 3 min) — A ring of pale dancers performs a jig in a field above Ostrova every midsummer night, and a farmer's daughter who has joined the dance each year since she was twelve has not once been home before the sun comes up.

Connected entities

• The Spare Day — Both are old rites that hold time apart. Both are kept by villages that do not explain.