Custom · Whittlesey · Legendary
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A dancing bear made of straw, and a bonfire to finish.
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The festival runs over a weekend in mid-January: the procession tours the town centre on the Saturday from about 10.30am and the bear is burned at Decoy Lakes on Sunday. It is free to watch, and the BBC reported in 2026 that roads close and parking is at Sir Harry Smith Community College.
Whittlesey: every January a man disappears inside a suit of straw and dances through these streets. On Sunday the bear goes up in flames.
On the Tuesday after Plough Monday, ploughmen in Whittlesey once wrapped one of their number from head to foot in straw, led him on a string and made him dance at doors for money, beer and tobacco. Enid Porter quotes a professor who met the bear in 1909 after forty years away, and an 1882 newspaper describing it; the custom faded around 1914, partly because the police banned it. It was revived in 1980 as a January festival. Today a fresh straw bear leads a procession of molly, morris and sword dancers through the town, and on the Sunday the costume is burned.