Pete Hughes gets caught up in a stomping celebration of local folk

Driving west out of Wantage into the setting sun onTuesday, I soon found myself in the winding hills of hobbit country, better known as Uffington, where my Sat Nav ceased to provide any help and I used the ancient White Horse Hill to navigate.

Here be dragons: specifically, those emblazoned on the colourful waistcoats of the Icknield Way Morris men, who are the opening act at Uffington’s Thomas Hughes Memorial Hall.

Inside, the men clack their sticks as they weave themselves around one another, while white haired village elders sip West Berkshire Brewery’s Old Boy from metal tankards. This is the perfect environment for John Spiers and Jon Boden, founder members of folk fusion big band Bellowhead, to beat the dust out of their 17th Century song book and perform some timeless English folk tunes.

The duo are on day four of their 33-date Backyard Songs tour, for which they have asked their upcoming audiences at each parochial location to suggest some local lyrical ballads for them to learn and perform. Tonight, for example, we are treated to Old Adam, collected in Faringdon in the late 19th century by a woman called Elizabeth Bond, an odd mix of vernacular and biblical mythology, about Adam and Eve not having to pay tailors’ bills on account of not wearing clothes.

Being a Wantage man, I was particular gratified that they played the Wantage Horn Pipe, although sadly I don’t think it’s due for a revival. Jon Boden has a way of playing the violin that reminds me of my local butcher: he saws with his elbow, but tenderly touches bow to strings to produce some startling sounds.

The duelling riddles of violin and John Spiers’ various accordions and melodeons intertwine hypnotically and halfway through the Sportsman’s Hornpipe, the room as one starts to shuffle its feet disconcertingly in time to the rhythm in a slightly animal fashion. It’s a bit like a scene from the French surrealist musical cartoon, Les Triplettes de Belleville.

As the night goes on, the ancient melodies percolate through the room and people begin to clap spasmodically, causing the more sedate members of the audience to spin around in alarm like a tribe of frightened baboons. By the end of the night we are divided into the still-seated foot tappers and those who can’t keep their legs from jigging any longer, and our entertainers are obliged to return for an encore.

This is not the duo’s first visit to Uffington’s village hall: in fact, thanks to local man and promoter George Reade, they are becoming regulars, returning once every 18 months. He does it purely for the music, and donates all the profit to local good causes.

So far their gigs have so far raised more than £1,500 the primary school and the museum. It’s nice to think that the music produced locally all those centuries ago is now sustaining the village, hundreds of years on.