Yahoo News Hundreds to attend Midsummer parade this weekend
The UK's oldest Midsummer parade is returning this weekend less than an hour from Liverpool.
Chester will be transformed on Saturday 22 and Sunday 23, June as the city unites for the historic Midsummer Watch Parade.
The Midsummer Watch Parade, which started in 1498, is the UK's oldest street parade and showcases a vibrant mix of characters such as dragons, angels, unicorns, green men, and Cernunnus the Celtic lord of the forest.
Setting off from Town Hall square at 2pm, the parade will be led by the City Guilds, the Lord Mayor of Chester and Chester's Karamba Samba Band.
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The Midsummer Watch was originally performed by the City Guilds at Midsummer before it was disbanded in 1670. It was then revived over 300 years later, in 1989.
When it returned, the parade featured the Chester family of giants, towering four-metre figures modelled after a father, mother and two daughters. These were created using descriptions from the city archives of the original medieval parade.
Since then, several other figures have been added to the parade, including an antelope and a Hippogriff from Greek Mythology. This year, a new pirate ship manned by the Chester Pirates will join the parade, being chased by the Royal Navy.
The inclusion of the pirate ship follows a successful crowdfunding campaign to build the float, after research revealed that a ship had previously been part of the parade in the 1600s.
Discussing the new pirate ship, Russell Kirk, the artistic director of Midsummer Watch, shared with CheshireLive: "We have some contemporary documents dated sixteen-hundred-and-something, which list everything in the parade; so, what we've done in the last twenty years is rebuild it.
"Originally, the ship is listed as a 'ship of fools', which would literally be about a ship full of jesters and all sorts of mad people. So, that was a reinterpretation of a ship of fools into the pirate ship."
