Northumberland

If all June days were as sunbaked as these, the great midsummer fair at Stagshawbank must have been a most colourful and popular affair. Situated at 700 feet up on the fells, with fine views in all directions, Stagshaw Common lies at the junction of the Roman Wall and Dere Street. The Street pierced the Wall at the Portgate making a natural meeting place. Recent editions of the Ordnance Survey still indicate “cattle fair” on the common but no cattle have been sold here for 30 years or more. Local people still remember the fair, three days and nights of hard-bargaining and revelry. The cottage on the edge of the common kept its doors shut and served refreshments through a small window. The fair, which had an international reputation in the Middle Ages, finally degenerated into a horse trading affair, though fiddlers and trinket-vendors maintained a tenuous link with the great traditions. Gipsies used to race their horses from one inn to the other up what is now the A8. The two inns remain and the verges are a favourite picnicking site.

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Facebook Twitter Pinterest Agricultural Show at Danby, North Yorkshire, 1961. Photograph: Mirrorpix/Getty Images

The common, too, survives though the fringes have been enclosed. It is pockmarked with old quarry workings, unkempt, ill-drained, and delightfully varied with gorse, heather, bracken, and sphagnum moss all flourishing in different soil conditions. The heat is such that the sheep are seeking the slightest shelter under the golden gorse. There used to be a fine cricket square on that part of the common that lies to the east of the main road and I am told that turf from this spot was used to repair the most famous cricket pitch in London, after the ravages of wartime.