Catherine Warr, A Yorkshire Year: Folklore, History, Traditions (Lancaster: Palatine Books, 2023), 288pp.

Catherine Warr’s eagerly awaited and comprehensive account of the seasonal customs of Yorkshire fills an important gap in the folklore scholarship on this English region (for it is more geographically accurate to consider Yorkshire a region than a county, divided as it is into several traditional counties and even more present-day local authorities) – a thorough, day-by-day and season-by-season catalogue of traditional festivities and commemorations. The publication of Steve Roud’s The English Year in 2006 drew attention to the importance of treating seasonal customs as a genus of folklore in their own right, as well as to a ‘calendrical’ approach as a legitimate approach to recording folklore (and sometimes the only coherent way to do so). Indeed, my own book Peterborough Folklore (2017) included a chapter on calendar customs that was calendrically constructed. While excellent, Roud’s book was naturally not comprehensive – and it served as an invitation for local folklorists to produce their own more detailed and regionally-oriented studies of calendar customs.

Catherine Warr, renowned as an innovative communicator of local history via her popular YouTube channel, has made a very valuable contribution to the folklore of Yorkshire by collating and interpreting in one place all of the calendar customs mentioned by the folklorists of earlier times. Her determination in seeking out obscure pamphlets and ephemera on local folklore to ensure the completest possible listing of calendar customs is especially impressive, although Warr is also admirably sceptical of the alleged antiquity of many of the customs she records. A Yorkshire Year will be an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in the folklore and customs of the North of England – and indeed anyone interested in English folklore, since many of the most interesting and curious calendar customs are to be found in Yorkshire.