Happy New Year from all of us at Shrewsbury Morris!
We will be publishing our 2018 Dance Programme soon, so watch this space.
Two dates for the diary!
2017 Dance Programme
Christmas Ceilidh
We did it!
Well, it rained. But we still walked 962km in total! And thanks to so many of you kindly donating, we’ve raised £1422 on JustGiving, and we think another £1000 offline. 4 lovely people representing the Midlands Air Ambulance Charity walked with us too – thank you!
It was a lovely day, we saw bits of Shropshire & Cheshire that many of us had never seen (personally, I recommend checking out the stretch of canal by Chemistry Farm in Whitchurch). Kingfishers & herons. Beautiful!
We finished up in the Red Lion in Ellesmere where Janet and the team fed up soup & chips. A fantastic team day and a really worthy charity supported.
Charity Walk
On October 1st, Shrewsbury Morris are walking 40K in aid of the Midlands Air Ambulance Charity – part of our 40th anniversary celebrations. Quite a few hardy souls are walking the whole 40K, with the rest of the team walking stretches of 30, 20 and 10 or manning the refreshment stations along the way!
We would love you to support us – you can donate here on our Just Giving page
Buy our CD, 40 Years Young!
As part of our 40th anniversary celebrations, we have recorded a CD. So if you have ever wondered what Shrewsbury Morris sounds like, now is your chance to find out!
The CD is professionally recorded and mastered, and features 19 tracks. Some of these are live recordings of us dancing, some are studio versions of traditional tunes that we dance to. You get a glimpse of our Christmas Ceilidh and tunes from right through our history, to the two dances we wrote to celebrate our 40th year.
Here’s a clip of what you can expect!
The CDs are £10 inc P&P – drop us a line to bev.langton@talk21.com and we’ll pop one in the post to you.
Rain, rain, go away!
We laugh in the face of puddles, we drop ice cubes down the vest of inclement weather! Sentiments worthy of any Morris side dancing in the UK and so it was when we arrived to perform at the ever welcoming and wonderful National Trust property at Dudmaston, near Bridgnorth, Shropshire to help them celebrate May Day.
However, despite the heavy showers we managed to dance well for three 40 minute spots, getting progressively muddier each time as a stony surface churned into a wet, sandy…..puddlier one and we have the shoes, shirts and dresses to prove it. As usual at Dudmaston the audiences were large and very appreciative which made up for any discomfort. And the Shrewsbury Lasses performed their new dance, Ruby Shrewsbury, for the first time in public!
We even helped plant a May Tree and led some very happy members of the public in an impromptu dance at the end of the day.
Big Busk & Bishops Castle
Well, we’ve started our 2016 dance season with two fabulous local events.
Nothing delights us more than dancing in our lovely town of Shrewsbury, so it was a real pleasure to take to the streets on April 2nd as part of the Big Busk. The Busk is a celebration of th life of Ben Bebbington (you can read his story here) and it’s a charity event that raises money for our local shelter for the homeless, The Ark. It’s a wonderful atmosphere in town – there’s music and dance everywhere all day, and every second person you see has an instrument slung across their back!
We have supported the Busk in various guises since it began, and this year we were dancing in the Market Square, and at the top of Pride Hill – two great dance spots for us. We did start in the rain though, as you can see from these slightly dismal photos!
It perked up a bit later on for our second spot and we drew a good crowd.
All in all, the Busk raised £10,000 – good show everyone!
The following weekend we were delighted to be asked by the Shropshire Bedlams & Martha Rhoden’s Tuppenny Dish to join them for a birthday celebration in their home town of Bishops Castle, along with the other local sides The Ironmen & Severn Gilders, and Leominster Morris. Great to have all the Shropshire sides together! We danced all over town and finished off with cake. Crikey it was a chilly day!
So all in all, two great dance outs to start our year! Next up, the fab Dudmaston on May bank holiday. If you’ve had the National Trust Spring Leaflet for Shropshire, you might notice one of our musicians cheekily featuring!
Shrewsbury Morris Start 2016 Year Oop North!
So, 2016 is our 40th Anniversary year and we’re looking forward to a twelve months packed with fun and lots of dancing.
We’ll be performing in and around Shrewsbury as always, as well as in Quatt, Whitchurch, Cardington, Bishop’s Castle, NT Dudmaston and Leicestershire.
We also have a few fun things in store such is “40 dances in 40 local locations” and a big birthday party in Shrewsbury Square on Sat 2nd July.
But we started our activities as always with our annual walking weekend, this time in Yorkshire. Kindly arranged as always by Sue and Steve Mulcock we all decanted North at the end of March and invaded the sleepy but lovely village of Malham for a weekend. We always stay in YHA accommodation and this was
very good as usual. The team combines socialising, music and some team “togetherness” with a bracing, challenging but fun walk on the Saturday of the weekend.
Ray had come up with another excellent walk which stretched the fitness of some of us but provided great views of the wonderful Yorkshire countryside. Most people (and children) managed the first half (from Malham to Settle) and we had a lovely team lunch in a super pub in Settle. The second half was undertaken by a few hardy souls and we returned to Malham via a different but equally superb route.
The Sat evening was a mixture of a fabulous team curry cooked as always by Steve followed by a great music and song session.
It is the last time that Sue and Steve will organise this kind of weekend, having decided to hand the baton on to someone else after nearly 20 years of organisation, negotiating with the YHA and attempting to keep everyone happy (not easy). They’ve done a magnificent team job for Shrewsbury Morris and we thank them very much for their efforts.
Our first dance outs are 2nd April for The Big Busk and 9th April in Bishops Castle for a gathering of local sides – needless to say we are really looking forward to getting the new season underway!! Come and see us :))) We’ll be posting from those events shortly.
