Today is May Day. In the photo above you can see part of a ladder in a church tower I went to recently. The ladder was made from the old may pole that was destroyed in the puritan hegemony after the Civil War.
If you enlarge the photo (just click on it) you can read the inscription: THIS WARE THE MAY POUL 1660.
Sir James Frazer, writing in The Golden Bough, argued that may poles were originally sacred trees that were refined over centuries into the beribboned structures we see today. This theory has been disputed by some folkloreists and anthropologists. However the preservation (no doubt covertly) of this local fragment of the may pole, in a disguised form as part of a ladder, suggests a reluctance to absolutely burn or destroy the fetishised object.
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