Chester will look almost unrecognisable on Saturday 22 and Sunday 23, June as the city comes together for the historic Midsummer Watch Parade.
The Midsummer, which began in 1498, is the UK’s oldest street parade and features a colourful array of characters including dragons, angels, unicorns, green men, and Cernunnus the Celtic lord of the forest.
The parade, which sets off from Town Hall Square at 2pm, will be led by the City Guilds, the Lord Mayor of Chester and Chester’s Karamba Samba Band.
The Summer Watch was originally performed by the City Guilds at Midsummer before it was disbanded in 1670. It would later be revived, over 300 years later, in 1989.
Upon its return in 1989, the parade featured the Chester family of giants, towering four-metre figures in the image of a father, mother and two daughters. They were created using descriptions from the city archives of the original medieval parade.
Since then there have been a number of other figures added to the parade, including an antelope and a Hippogriff from Greek Mythology.
This year will see another new addition to the parade in the form of a new pirate ship manned by the Chester Pirates that will be pursued by the Royal Navy.
The addition of the pirate ship comes following a successful crowdfunding campaign to build the float, after research revealed that a ship had previously been a part of the parade in the 1600s.
Speaking about the new pirate ship Russell Kirk, the Midsummer Watch’s artistic director told ChesireLive: “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.”