Make Beltain Your Special Day with a Sacred Handfasting!
For the second year, Butser is offering Beltain festival-goers the opportunity to book their own handfasting ceremony. There are six spaces available for people to honour their bond with a public hand tie.
You can book your handfasting as a friendship or family ceremony, a vow renewal, an engagement, or for your wedding. Each ceremony will be unique to you and held with full respect and deep care honouring your union. The ceremonies will be held in a beautiful sacred space inside one of the ancient dwellings at Butser Farm during the Beltain festival on Saturday May 4th 2024.
A Sacred space to celebrate!
Butser has reserved one of its oldest houses, the Moel y Gerddi, to celebrate your special bond during the Beltain festival. You will chat with the celebrant in advance of the festival to tailor your ceremony and the bonds you want to honour. On the day, you will arrive at the beautifully decorated house to meet the celebrant and publicly share your bond.
We will create handmade cord ties for you to use during the handfasting and keep with you, and you will have a handfasting certificate as a memento of the day.
Take away the best memento
The wonderful besom that you use as part of your ceremony can be personalised and taken home. Our friends at Three Copse will be providing handcrafted brooms for you to jump over into your future together.
Made in the traditional way, from hazel and birch, the large brooms are around 6ft and beautifully made. We will engrave your besom to remind you of your magical celebration at Beltain.
Image of besoms courtesy of Cats Paw Images.
Book your own handfasting at Butser’s Beltain!
Make Beltain your own special day and help to support the work that we do at Butser Ancient Farm. As an independent not-for-profit, every penny helps us continue our work in education, research, community, and conservation! We can’t wait to help you create a special bond during the incredible Beltain festival…
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Eva Greenslade and Janet Tahiri are pagan celebrants offering nature based ceremonies for rites of passage, including Handfasting Ceremonies, in the hope to reclaim these ancient customs in modern times to help empower people and augment the ceremonies of people's life rites of passage.
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Friends and family, including children who are already attending Beltain can be part of your ceremony. The roundhouse chosen gives a limited number of other festival-goers the chance to witness your ceremony and join in with the relevant blessings, while the space retains an intimate feel.
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The cost includes a twenty minutes ceremony on the day of Beltain. The ceremony will be tailored to you and the bonds you want to honour in a planning meeting with the celebrant before Beltain. You will receive a handmade tie from Butser and a certificate to remember the occasion.
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You can decide to include a handmade, engraved besom to be used in the ceremony which is then yours to keep after you have jumped into your new future together!
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These are not religious ceremonies. There will prayers said to open and close the space. They are intended to hold the sacred magical qualities of life and bring in blessings and wishes from the divine energies of mother earth. We ask that you open your heart, and bring your beliefs, not as a religious act but as the energy of love to bless this handfasting.
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Handfasting is legal to carry out, however, it is not a legally binding declaration of marriage. It is a historic and beautiful way to honour your bond together.