Montol Festival 2024
December 21 All day
Much of Cornwall’s cultural past is Celtic and pagan in origin. It’s full of folklore, myth, and legend. So that ancient past (and we mean ancient!) is about as Christian as someone claiming that a pasty represents the body of Christ. Wind the clock forward to the modern day, however, and it follows that an inherently Celtic event can’t also be a Christian event, right?
Wrong. And massively wrong if you subscribe to that idea because isn’t Christmas itself a wonderful mix of ancient pagan traditions with the more modern stories of Christ and St Nicholas? And isn’t Cornwall itself a land that’s built on strong Celtic and Christian ideals that so often go hand-in-hand too?
What we’re trying to say here is that a handful of traditional Cornish festivals combine the Duchy’s Celtic roots with its Christian ideals to great, colourful, exciting effect. And Montol 2024 has to be one of the best examples of this marriage of cultures, customs and traditions. It happens during every winter solstice (incidentally, the feast of St Thomas the Apostle) on 21 December every year in Penzance.
