Montol Festival

The Montol Festival is an annual festival in Penzance, Cornwall, UK, held on the 21st of December each year since 2007. The festival is a revival or reinterpretation of many of the traditional Cornish midwinter customs & Christmas traditions formerly practiced in and around the Penzance area and common to much of Cornwall at one point. Montol is held on the traditional date of the feast of St Thomas the Apostle, usually the 21st of December, which always coincides with the winter solstice.

Edward Lhuyd, in his 1700 MSS of vocabulary in the Cornish language, states that Montol means 'winter solstice'. However, he later translates the word as 'balance' (in Latin, Trutina – 'a set of scales').

At the very core of the festival are several of the revived customs of the West Cornwall area including, predominantly, Guise dancing, the masked celebrations common to Cornwall in the 19th century, the Cornish candle dance (Dons Cantol) in revived Cornish and the performance of traditional Guisers plays such as St George and the Turkish Knight or Buffy and the Bucca. Cornish Christmas carols also feature during the festivities. The "Chalking of the Mock", a Cornish Yule Log custom usually found in pubs or homes on Christmas Eve, is part of the climax of the celebrations, usually happening at 10pm near the dock area of the town.

The historical basis for many of the customs described above is taken from the texts of notable Cornish antiquarians and contemporary research into the subject. A. K. Hamilton Jenkin in his book Cornish Homes and Customs describes the Guise dance processions and performances of 1831 as "like an Italian carnival" and further noted that "everyone including the rich and the great came masked and disguised on to the streets". However, he does not give a reference for this quote.

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