It is a date that was at the heart of British culture for centuries: May Day, the moment when spring enters full bloom and summer is a-coming in.

Now, after a long decline in interest, traditional May Day activities are experiencing their own rebirth. Sales of maypoles are growing and the number of morris dancing teams is also on the rise, with crowds attending May Day festivals of a size not seen for decades.

On Tuesday, morris teams will get up before daybreak to “dance in” the dawn in dozens of places including Bluebell Hill in Kent, the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset and at Felixstowe Ferry in Suffolk, and there will be parades later on in Padstow, Minehead, Glastonbury and Edinburgh.

“A lot of morris teams will be dancing in the dawn,” said Melanie Barber, president of the Morris Federation, which represents about two-thirds of the 13,000 morris dancers in the UK, including “sides” (teams) like the White Rose Morris Men in Huddersfield and the Abingdon Traditional Morris Dancers in Oxford. “It’s probably a farming tradition, dancing as the sun rises then going off and having a good breakfast. We have more teams joining – a few stop, but on balance numbers are going up.”

Maypole dancing is another activity which is seeing greater participation, fuelled by sales of collapsible maypoles which can be easily stored at schools according to Mike Ruff, who teaches maypole dancing. “I never thought that I’d make my living from maypole dancing,” said Ruff, who sells 200 maypole instruction packs a year. “But there’s definitely a good steady growth in interest.”

People have danced around maypoles for centuries, but the formal dances involving 12 or 24 people braiding ribbons around the pole was the invention of Victorian art critic John Ruskin. “There are similar traditions around the world,” Ruff said. “You see it in Argentina, Brazil, some of the Caribbean islands.”

He believes that the interest in maypoles is fuelled partly by curiosity about English culture and also by modern interpretations. “It’s now viewed as a creative artform rather than just doing the same old formula,” he said, citing modern interpretations by Street Dance the Maypole and the English National Ballet. Folk band Skinny Lister have performed a maypole dance with Land Rovers and there are plans to erect a modern maypole in the Strand, an echo of the 130ft-high pole that was put up in 1661 by Charles II to celebrate the restoration of the monarchy.

In that period, May Day was “more like Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, one of the great turning points of the year,” according to Ronald Hutton, professor of history at Bristol University, and a leading authority on British folklore.

“It was the English version of the feast which opened the summer season, across northern Europe: when the grass was growing again and so livestock could be put into the outfields or summer pastures, which often involved a lot of movement. In agrarian societies, the crops had all been sown and were sprouting, and a break could be taken before the weeding really began.”

Children from a local primary school dancing round the maypole on May Day. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Witchcraft was another concern for farmers. Edward Lhwyd, the first keeper of the Ashmolean museum in Oxford, visited Linlithgow in 1699 to observe local customs, including the use of crystals to cure cattle. “Some on May Day put them into a tub of water and besprinkle all their cattle with that water, to prevent being elf-struck, bewitch’d,” he wrote.

A lot of May Day traditions are much more recent, according to Steve Roud, the author of The English Year, a comprehensive guide to English customs.

May Day started the night before with “bringing in the May”, where everyone in the village would gather bits of greenery and flowers from fields and forests.

“They’d bring it back and decorate their homes and the maypole too,” Roud said. “May dew was another thing – it was meant to have magical properties so that if you washed in it, you’d keep your complexion.” Women would get up before dawn to gather May dew – perhaps an added incentive for the morris dancers to dance in the dawn.

“The Victorians reinvented May Day and cleaned it up,” he said. “The old atmosphere was that the whole village would get taken over. It was raucous, with lots of drinking and dancing. It was one of the very few occasions when young men and young women could mix together. The Victorians didn’t like that at all.”

The village fete, May queens, garlands and maypoles were the Victorian vision of May Day, Roud said, but he is not nostalgic for the lost traditions. “Customs always change and reflect the needs of society.”

So is May Day still relevant to most people? “There’s a political or nationalist [atmosphere] around May Day now,” Roud said. “The Tories don’t like it because it’s associated with International Labour Day and they want St George’s Day or Trafalgar Day to commemorate something or other. It’s not much to do with old customs – it’s much more how people see it, as having a day off work.”