Punkie Night's Hollow Lanterns

E. M. Thornbury
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — Hinton St George, late October

Halloween, when it finally arrives in Somerset, finds the villages around Hinton St George already lit. The custom comes a week or so early, falling on the last Thursday of October, and it asks nothing of pumpkins at all. The lanterns here are carved from mangel-wurzels, those coarse fodder beets grown for cattle, hollowed and scored with faces and dragged on string through lanes gone properly dark. The children call it Punkie Night, and they have called it that, by most accounts, for longer than anyone now living can confirm.

The word punkie is thought to come from pumpkin itself, or from an older dialect word for a lantern or for the spirit it was meant to hold off, the sources disagree and I will not pretend otherwise. What is not disputed is the shape of the custom. A mangel-wurzel is cut open at the top, the flesh scraped out, a face cut into the shell with a knife, a stub of candle set inside. The children parade these through Hinton St George and the neighbouring village of Chiselborough, singing as they go, an old rhyme asking for a candle or a light, something close kin to the souling and guising songs sung across England on this same stretch of the calendar, when the dead were thought to walk and the living went door to door for cakes or coins or candle ends to keep their own lights burning.

The tale told locally to explain it concerns the Chiselborough fair. The men of the village, it is said, went one year to the fair at Hinton St George and did not come home by dark. Their wives went looking for them, and finding no lanterns to hand, pulled mangel-wurzels from the field, hollowed them on the spot, and lit their way home with them. The custom is said to have stuck, repeated each year after as both a joke at the husbands' expense and a practical answer to a dark walk. It is a tidy story, and tidy stories about old customs are usually later than the custom itself. The turnip lantern, carried to ward off wandering spirits on the nights around Samhain and All Hallows, is attested across Britain and Ireland long before anyone thought to carve a pumpkin, and Punkie Night reads to me like a local, living fragment of that much older practice, given a human tale to carry it and keep it tellable.

What I find worth recording is that it survived at all. Souling and guising largely faded from England through the last century, pressed out by the newer, louder, American-shaped Halloween with its pumpkins and its trick-or-treat. Punkie Night did not fade, not in Hinton St George. The mangel-wurzel is harder to carve than a pumpkin, the flesh dense and stringy, the smell when it is scored something between a vegetable patch and a bonfire, and still the children do it, still the candles go in, still the procession turns the lanes orange for one night before the wider Halloween arrives behind it with its own noise. Whether the lanterns ever truly kept anything off, wife-seeking husband or wandering soul, is not a question the custom seems much concerned with. It is kept because it has always been kept, which is, in the end, most of what lore is.

E. M. Thornbury is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. She walks boundaries — parish bounds, hedge banks, the lines where one field's law stops and another begins, and the markers people put there to make the change legible. She keeps meticulous notes, and distrusts every conclusion in them, including her own.

The rest of the season is gathered in Nights of the Dead.