Above: We sat in semi-darkness, which made getting a clear photograph impossible

New cultural centre (absolutely new, less than a year old), comprising lecture halls, seminar rooms, small museum (displaying artefacts previously kept in provincial vaults). Because it focuses on the region I am studying, I am resigned to visiting the centre on a regular basis, even though the experience is dispiriting. Although the buildings are new, everything within is presented in a politically correct format that has become dated, and does not allow variance of interpretation.

Sunday afternoon, and a recital of folk songs collected personally by the performers and illustrating different aspects of village life in the two counties over the centuries. This was pay-sant culture dealing with small farmers, poachers, itinerant workers who would know every field in a ten mile radius, but would never go outside that area. Riddle songs from the 1900 potato boom craze, Morris tunes from the 1820s, hunting songs prefaced with a politically correct apology, and an assurance that fox-hunting was not being promoted or condoned. The songs and poems described topographical features and natural phenomenon (the Jack o’ Lantern lights that form from the methane in the marshes and creep along the ground), plough boys transported for drunken brawling (the county was responsible for the largest number of transportations to Australia in the nineteenth century), a tradition of harvest songs that celebrated by name long-dead farmers renowned for their generosity.

We sat in semi-darkness, which made getting a clear photograph impossible. The performers had a variety of musical instruments which they played, delivering their songs in droning untrained voices. The recital finished with a series of drinking songs, which would have been performed in farmhouses – and when I looked in the little museum next door, in the last few minutes before it closed, I saw a medieval carving of a domestic party scene that illustrated the oral culture we had just heard.