A diary of Ascension Day, by Oswin Spurling

An original diary written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this diary, written in 1877, a thirteen-year-old boy describes taking part in ‘beating the bounds’, an old custom in which the people of a parish walked round its boundary to mark where it lay.

Thursday, 10th May. Ascension Day, and the day for beating the bounds, which in this parish is done only once in seven years, so that I had never seen it. We met at the lych-gate at nine: the vicar, both churchwardens, old Mr Ketteridge the parish clerk with the map rolled under his arm, and twenty boys of the parish, each carrying a peeled willow wand as long as himself.

The boundary is near eleven miles round, and we walked every yard of it. At each boundary stone the vicar read a short prayer, the boys struck the stone with their wands, and then one boy was taken up by the arms and legs and bumped upon it, so that he should remember all his life where the parish ends. I was bumped at the stone by Scrogg Wood, and I shall certainly remember it.

Where the line runs through Pinchbeck’s Mill the miller had left his front door open, as is the custom, and the whole procession passed through his kitchen and out by the back window, the vicar going over the sill with great dignity and one churchwarden with none. At the brook the line runs down the middle of the water, and Mr Ketteridge insisted that two boys wade it, which they did, up to their knees and complaining loudly.

We had bread and cheese at the Hare and Hounds at one o’clock, paid for by the parish, and came home by six. Mother says my boots are ruined. I do not care. In seven years I shall be twenty, and I mean to carry the map.

(a) How often are the bounds beaten in the writer’s parish? (b) Why was a boy bumped on each boundary stone? (c) What does the final sentence suggest about the writer’s feelings about the day?