Midsummer in Britain covers two distinct dates that are usually conflated: the summer solstice around 21 June, the astronomical longest day, and Midsummer’s Day on 24 June, the feast of St John the Baptist.
The Church placed John’s nativity six months before Christmas, which put it neatly on top of an existing midsummer festival — the same approach taken with a good many other dates in the calendar.
The light
The thing visitors underestimate. Britain is far enough north that midsummer daylight is extraordinary:
- London gets over 16 hours, with usable light until nearly eleven at night.
- Edinburgh gets around 17.5 hours.
- Shetland gets around 19 hours and never becomes properly dark — a lingering twilight islanders call the simmer dim, in which it is possible to read outdoors at midnight.
The trade-off arrives in December, when London has under eight hours and it is dark by four in the afternoon.
Stonehenge
The largest British solstice gathering by a wide margin. Stonehenge opens for free overnight access on the solstice, and several thousand people — druids, pagans, ravers, families and the merely curious — gather to watch the sun rise over the Heel Stone.
It is the one night of the year that visitors may walk among the stones without a special ticket. English Heritage manages it as “managed open access”, and it is a strange, cheerful, sleepless and slightly chaotic night.
Archaeologists note, incidentally, that the winter solstice alignment at Stonehenge is the more precise of the two, and increasingly think midwinter was the more important gathering for the people who built it.
The old customs
Midsummer was a major festival across medieval Britain and much of northern Europe, and the customs were mostly about fire:
- Bonfires on hilltops on Midsummer Eve, sometimes with burning wheels rolled downhill.
- Midsummer watches — processions with pageantry through towns, which in London were substantial civic events until the Reformation.
- Divination and love charms, particularly involving St John’s wort, gathered on the eve.
Most of it faded after the Reformation, and Cornwall’s hilltop bonfire chain — revived in the twentieth century and still lit from Land’s End along the county — is now among the fullest surviving versions.
Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream has done more than anything to fix the association in the English mind between midsummer and enchantment, confusion and mischief. Its setting is really Midsummer Eve, when the boundary between the human and fairy worlds was traditionally held to be at its thinnest.
The turning point
Worth noting for anyone who finds British seasonal talk odd: the solstice marks the longest day, so from that point the evenings begin drawing in. British people reliably observe this out loud within days of midsummer, in tones of mild gloom, while the weather is still improving and the best of the summer is entirely ahead of them.