Snail Creep Played by St Dennis Band at Wheal Martyn Clay Museum July 2022

Audio file: Snail Creep from Rescorla Festival’s “Snail Creeps and Tea Treats: Clay Country Customs”  project 2008

Open downloadable pdf file:Rescorla_Snail_Creep

Video Link: Rescorla Festival: Rescorla Snail Creep at Wheal Martin Museum and Country Park 2008

Notes from the Rescorla Festival “Snail Creep and Tea Treats: Clay Country Customs ” Project 2008

The villages of Rescorla, Molinnis, Roche Withiel and St Wenn, along the Eastern side of the Clay country, marked their Tea Treats with a fascinating custom going under the rather strange name of “Snail Creep”. This is a dance unique to this part of Cornwall and involves a long procession of couples following a band, lead by two people holding up branches – the tentacles of the snail. The dancers form a large circle and then spiral into the middle and back out again which would have been an amazing spectacle and quite a logistic achievement with several hundred people! In Molinnis it was held on the Primitive Methodist feast day in a field at Lower Molinnis and led by led by the village Fife and Drum Band.

There were no special steps, people just followed behind the band around the field and invited people standing watching to join in. It was the place for young men to pick their girls and some married couples maintained that they originally met at the Snail Creep. At Withiel it was held in the School playing field and was part of a Tea Treat event used to raise money to cover the cost of the District Nurse based at St Wenn. The dance was known to Ken Phillips the Cornish Dialect Scholar from Roche and is noted by M Courtney but a very clear description is provided in the Western Antiquary of 1881

“At Roche and in one or two adjacent Parishes a curious dance is performed at their annual feasts and which, I am of the opinion, is of very ancient origin. It enjoys the rather undignified name of “snail Creep” but would more properly be called the serpent’s coil. The Following is scarcely a perfect description of it:- The young people being all assembled in a large meadow, the village band strikes up a simple but lively air and marches forward followed by the whole assemblage, leading hand in hand (or more closely linked in the case of the whole keeping time to a lively step. The band or head of the serpent keep marching in an ever-narrowing circle whilst its train of dancing followers becomes coiled around it in circle after circle. It is now that the most interesting part of the dance commences, for the band taking a sharp turn about commences to retrace the circle, still following as before and a number of young men with

long leafy branches of trees in their hands as standards direct the counter movement with almost military precision. The lively music and constant re-passing couples make this a very exhilaratingdance and no rural sports which our poets treat could be more thoroughly enjoyable.” Description of Snail Creep by Mrs W.J.Scott

“In the fading light the fife and drum band could be heard in the distance . Presently it would march on to the field and this was the summons for all young people to choose a member of the opposite sex. Then linking arms the stage was set for the ‘Creep’.”

The obvious reason for calling this dance the ‘snail creep’ is the way in which it coils in on its self like the markings on a snail shell and also the way in which people leading it held branches aloft like the snails tentacles. Whether there is any deeper mythology behind this we do not know although according to Morton Nance snails were held in certain esteem by miners who offered a snail a drop of melted tallow from their candles or a crumb of pasty or fuggan, on seeing one on their way to bal (mine) in the morning. There were also children’s rhymes found elsewhere in Cornwall associated with snails such as that from Camborne and usually involving a game of addressing the snail and swinging it around until it’s horns extended:

“Jin-jorn, Jin jorn put out your long horn

The cows is eatin the barley corn”

“Snail snail come out of your hole

Or I will beat you as black as coal”

“Lucky Snail, Lucky Snail , go over my head

And bring me a penny before I go to bed “ 8

When the dance was revived as part of the Rescorla Project and performed at a Tea Treat held in Wheal Martyn Visitors Centre in September 2007. A group of local musicians came together to form the processional band some of whom could remember watching their families taking part in the Snail Creep as small children in the 1930s. One member of the band, Mike Jenkin could remember his father, who came from Rescorla, playing “Tavern in the Town” as part of a set of tunes including Mrs Harris’s Snail Creep for the dance . Although first published in America in the 1880s “Tavern in the Town “ has a reputation for being associated with Cornwall which probably reflects the Duchy’s close ties with America resulting from the mining industry and late 19th Century migration.

References

Collins, R E L. “An Old Cornish Custom—The Snail Creep”. Cornish Magazine August 1958

Mrs WJ Scott, Description of Snail Creep “Tales from the White Mountains”. Cornwall Literature

Development Project, 1993, p.18 .

Rescorla Project April 2008: Mrs Gwen Millet of Withiel contributed her recollections of the Snail Creep at St Wenn and Withiel as part of the oral history recorded for the Project.

Phillips, K C, “Charles Lee. The Cornish Journal of Charles Lee 1892 –1908”, Tabb House Padstow 1995

Courtney, M A. “Cornish Feasts and Folklore”, 1886 page 234, description of Snail Creep

Wad, W C. Western Antiquary, 1881. Description of Snail Creep

Robert Morton Nance, “Snail Lore”, Old Cornwall Journal 1957 Page 348