Incense burners as big as basketballs send thick clouds of smoke into the hyped-up crowd. “Hoo hoo Holly!” cries a man in a suit of twisted roots, looking like an oversized Shredded Wheat. The crowd begins to chant: “Make way for the Holly!” And two 10ft tree gods – the Oak King and the Holly King – begin to lash and headbutt each other, as flamethrowers blast the air with hot orange streams. These mysterious-seeming traditions are part of Montol, Cornwall’s biggest solstice festival. Each year on 21 December, Penzance’s high streets close to traffic and crowds of thousands wearing elaborate outfits and horses skulls prowl, throw brussels sprouts and burn effigies of the sun.

Elements of Montol have pagan roots, including rituals such as “wearing animal masks and cross-dressing, going from house to house performing ludicrous plays and performing really crap music”, says one co-organiser, Aaron Broadhurst. But Montol itself only began in 2007, when Simon Reed, former Penzance mayor and campaigner for Cornish Culture, found the word, meaning “balance”, in an old Cornish dictionary. In its first incarnation, says co-organiser Paul Tyreman, the festival consisted of a wind band, the Turkey Rhubarb Band, who led a procession up Market Jew Street and through the town. “People gathered, sung carols, lit a beacon, and went home.”

Over time, the festival acquired more traditions, some rooted in Cornish culture, others entirely made up. There are osses – people wearing real horse skulls who prowl the streets throughout the day’s events, in keeping with the Padstow May Day “obby oss” and the Welsh Mari Lwyd (Grey Mare) – and Cornish carols are sung. There is guise dancing – costumed dancing – that stretches back to at least the late 19th century.

But Reed invented the Guilds, says Broadhurst – the costumed troupes who roam the pubs and streets after dark performing absurd plays and “testing the ale”. (This might remind you of Lewes Bonfire Night, except Penzance’s shop windows don’t get boarded up.) And sprouts are both currency and ammunition for pelting fellow revellers in the street, a tradition with a poignant origin: it honours the late John Dudding of Falmouth, the self-styled Chancellor of the Cabbage who died suddenly in 2021 and had always attended Montol dressed – naturally – as a cabbage, to be duly pelted with sprouts. Before the festivities begin today, a man carries a green crate filled with sprouts through the streets, singing: “I have all the sprouts.”

• Osses on the prowl around Penzance.

• Aaron and Nicole Broadhurst, dressed as Lord and Lady Montol, during the Sundowner parade.

• A band plays as they parade through Market Place.

• (Left) Four horsemen of the apocalypse, including Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. (Right) Cllr Stephen Reynolds gets nibbled by the osses.

• Dancers, musicians and revellers swarming on the streets of Penzance.

Montol is supported with a £7,500 grant from the town council. “What is really important about our festival culture here in Penzance is that they are community festivals,” says mayor Stephen Reynolds. “They are by the community for the community. Our job is to support, but not direct or control. Everything else comes from volunteer effort.” It’s not about return on investment. “In Penzance, we resist this kind of corporate feel that some festivals can acquire when they get big. We are the antithesis of corporate down here.”

The far west of Cornwall only encourages such festivities, says Broadhurst. “When I first moved here from Bristol, someone said to me: ‘You’ve got to understand this about Penwith. Cornwall’s a bit like a Christmas stocking. Where do all the nuts end up? Down in the toe.’ It’s true.”

The festival begins gently at 2pm with border morris dancing. Pensans (Penzance) Morris and other visiting troupes take over the traffic-free Greenmarket. They clack sticks in yellow and black costumes and their performance of What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor is a sober palate-cleanser for the madness to follow. The guise dancers include the Scaleybacks of Hakeybay, lead by Admiral Hake from St Ives, who dress to a nautical theme: one is a selkie, another a mermaid, there is even a lighthouse. Generally, Broadhurst explains, the poor dress as rich, and everyone wears masks. “The tradition is that you wear tatters, which is a social inversion thing, or you wear mock posh or mock formal, where you take the piss out of the rich.”

Tyreman and Aaron and his wife, Nicole, have been the administrative engine of Montol since 2023, when Reed stepped down. When volunteers were asked to take over, the room at the pub where they met suddenly emptied out. “It was like a scene in a comedy, with a sudden scraping of chairs,” says Aaron. “The room was empty apart from four or five of us. We were sat there thinking: ‘Oh shit, what have we done?’

• Pensans morris dancers in action, bearing the county’s colours: black, white and yellow.

• (Left) Festival-goers in full regalia. (Right) Morris dancers on the march.

• Musicians play tunes for the morris dancers.

Among the many challenges in mounting a festival that runs for more than eight hours across 22 spots is managing locals’ conflicting takes on what it stands for. “There’s one lady who won’t have anything to do with it because she thinks it’s too pagan,” says Tyreman.

Equally, says Aaron, “I have to deal with a bunch of pagans who think it’s a pagan festival, and tell me to get rid of all this Christian iconography! We sometimes describe Montol as a big family – from time to time we absolutely hate each other.”

At 3.30pm, the crowd grows around the Farmers Arms for the Cornish carols. Facilitator Kelsey Michael is a community singing leader in Penzance. She draws from a book called Hark! The Glad Sound of Cornish Carols by Hilary Coleman and Sally Burley, a record of carols sung throughout the county. Kelsey keeps the arrangements to simple two-part harmonies to allow everyone to join in. “Despite the singing culture in Cornwall, sometimes people are nervous about it,” she says.

• Carol singing on Causeway.

• Festive performers surrounded by spectators.

More nerve-racking, however, are the horse-headed osses. Mid-afternoon, Penhood and Maur Bras are walking slowly down Causewayhead, snapping hats from festival-goers’ heads. Their teasers (minders), Rachel and Sophie, make sure they don’t fall over. Both osses call in to the Zennor Wild cafe, stooping through the doorway and nudging drinkers’ coffees.

“With the osses, there’s this tingling sensation,” says Aaron. “Especially with kids, because they are both scared because it’s a big monster who might bite their head off, but they also know it’s a person in a suit. Our osses are so skilful, they can use their teeth to pick up bags of sprouts from the Co-op.”

Acquiring a horse skull is simple. Wearing one is more complicated. “The skulls weigh a ton,” says Aaron. “You can buy them on eBay, or you can go to an abattoir. In fact, if you approach an abattoir in advance, they will leave them outside in a bucket for the flesh to be eaten by maggots, so the skull is reasonably clean. Then you take it home and boil it in water and bleach and find someone you know who can articulate the jaw. You want a good snap.”

• Charlotte and Linus carrying the midwinter sun to the ‘burning of the sun’ parade at Princess May Recreation Ground.

• A fire dancer at the recreation ground.

• (Left) Paul Carey, band leader and bagpiper. (Right) Performers at the Rec.

• Lord Montol cackles alongside one of the osses near the bonfire.

Come 5.30pm, the Oak King and the Holly King are due to battle under the clock at Greenmarket. “Our ceremony is about calling back the light of the sun for the following year,” says Joe Gray, whose job is to choreograph the fight. “One of them wins each solstice and will retain the right to rule beside the earth goddess.”

Gray, formerly of Bristol circus theatre group the Invisible Circus, now runs a junkyard called Shiver Me Timbers, where participants forage for most of the props for Montol. His own bucca (male sea spirit), a 12ft metal pagan god that looks like Count Binface with articulated tentacles, looks fresh from his scrap heap.

In the fight itself, of course, this being midwinter, after a few decent body checks, the Oak King wins, as is tradition. “We’ve been doing this for about six years, although it sometimes doesn’t look like we’ve done it before,” says Gray. “As with anything at Montol, there’s a sense of anarchy and misrule and mischief that goes along with all of it.”

You can watch a previous year’s tree fight in a short film about Montol that Gray has made with Ryan Mackfall and Kingsley Marshall. Howlsavla Gwav (winter solstice) will be released in 2026, with music by acclaimed local folk musician Daisy Rickman. “It started as a little advert for the festival, but the scope grew into this crazy, uncontrollable plant.”

• The Skaleybacks of Hakeybay.

• A dragon interacts with spectators on the parade route back from the recreation ground.

• (Left) Stilt walkers welcome the winter solstice. (Right) Tilly, AKA the court of the counterfeit Kerneweks.

• The beast of Bodmin Moor tries to break free.

Much of the festival is driven by music from the Raffidy Dumitz Band, this year joined by a group of musicians from Callington, far away in east Cornwall, the Kelliwik Golowi Band. After the tree fight, the combined bands are the heart of the procession up to the muddy Princess May Recreation Ground from 6pm, where the sun is ceremonially burned, showering the delighted crowd in orange sparks.

By 8pm, during a lull in the formal processions, the Guilds’ “revels” begin – and the first sprouts are lobbed. At the Admiral Benbow pub, one man aims a sprout that bounces off someone’s head, and laughs. Two people advance behind road closure signs, using them like riot shields. Occasionally, the first-floor window of the pub is pulled down and armfuls of the diminutive brassica are flung out, hitting festival-goers. One man escapes from the melee, and yells to his friends: “I got sprouted in the balls! I love this festival!”

• Spectators holding candles ready for the final procession.

• A firepit awaits the late-night revellers.

• (Left) The ‘chalking of the mock’ by Tas Nadelik, near Jubilee Pool. (Right) Spectators watch amid the glow of the firepit.

• A spontaneous line dance breaks out as the festival draws to a close.

The festival culminates with Tas Nadelik, Cornish Father Christmas, leading a torchlit procession through the streets – now covered in crushed sprouts – to the sea. Down on the promenade, the Mock, or yule log, is “chalked” – burned in a roaring brazier. At the end of the procession, Lord Montol gives a speech and the remaining sprouts rain down on him.

What does it all mean? It’s a festival full of homemade rituals, and Cornish defiance. “The parades are small acts of reconquest,” says Aaron. “We’re taking ownership of our little town.”

On the year’s shortest day, it’s also a much-needed injection of energy. “The festival makes your hair stand on end,” says mayor Stephen Reynolds. “It’s amazing to be in the midst of all that energy. The further west you go, the wilder it gets.”