PINtPRESSEssay26 October 2026 · Beer history · Folklore

Season of the Witch

The Green Man’s face is medieval. His pagan biography is much harder to pin down. His name was already hanging outside the pub.

A week before Halloween, the pub has started to acquire cobwebs it did not have to earn. There is a plastic skeleton by the fruit machine, something orange on the pump clip and, outside, a face looking down through a mouthful of leaves.

The skeleton will be back in a box by November. The Green Man gets to stay.

His relatives peer out of the stonework at Exeter, Norwich and Southwell: faces sprouting foliage, oak leaves spilling from their mouths. The usual explanation is that he is a pagan god who survived the conversion, smuggled into the masonry by craftsmen who had not quite let go of the old religion.

It is a wonderful story. The carvings are old enough. The certainty about what they mean is considerably newer.

He is not even an autumn figure. His best-known modern interpretation ties him to May Day. We have recruited him for Halloween because he looks the part, which is a useful introduction to an evening when the stories behind the decorations can be as elaborate as the decorations themselves.

Three nights in seven days. This is the first of three.

A new history under an old pub name

In 1939, Lady Raglan published “The Green Man in Church Architecture” in the journal Folklore. It began with a face on a chancel corbel at Llangwm, shown to her by the vicar, who suggested that the leaves coming from its mouth represented the spirit of inspiration. Raglan saw a Green Man instead.

She connected the church carvings with the figures on pub signs, Robin Hood and the leafy Jack-in-the-Green of May celebrations. Behind them she discerned the survival of pagan custom. The old religion had been hiding among the saints.

Her article helped establish the interpretation, although neither the name nor all those connections began in 1939: a 1932 letter in Folklore already calls the Llangwm carving a “green man”. What remains unproved is the leap from a leafy face to a surviving fertility cult.

The pub name was older still. Green-clad foresters and wild men had occupied the signs before the foliate head became their familiar replacement, a sequence David Barnett traced for Prospect. The name helped explain the carving; the carving subsequently took over the sign.

The sign stayed up. The explanation changed.

So what do you actually drink?

Pumpkin beer has a genuine history. It just does not begin with anyone trying to make a pint taste like an autumn pudding.

In colonial America, pumpkin was something you could ferment when conventional brewing ingredients were scarce. A 1771 recipe reproduced by Colonial Williamsburg treats it much like an apple for cider: crush it, press the juice, boil, hop, ferment and cask. The pumpkin had work to do. As the historian Cindy Ott told Total Ales, “Pumpkin beer used to be a drink of last resort.”

Bill Owens helped revive pumpkin ale at Buffalo Bill’s Brewery in California during the 1980s. The brewery dates its version to 1986, though accounts of his experiments vary. The inspiration is often said to have been George Washington brewing with pumpkins, a story repeated more confidently than it is documented.

The modern beer found its character in the spice cupboard. Pumpkin alone is restrained; cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg announce themselves. The colonial brewer wanted something to ferment. The modern drinker recognises something to put cream on.

Pumpkin pie standing in for pumpkin: a perfectly reasonable thing to enjoy, provided we do not mistake the flavour for an unchanged colonial recipe.

For a beer whose production is governed by the British autumn, look for green hop. And look now.

Most brewing hops are dried after picking. Green hop beers use them fresh, while the harvest is happening and before the undried cones deteriorate. Kent’s criteria require them to reach the brew within twelve hours. The brewer works to the picking schedule; the marketing department gets whatever dates are left.

By Halloween week, the main celebrations are behind us. The Spa Valley Railway’s festival, with its substantial green hop selection, finished last weekend. There may still be casks to find elsewhere. There will not be a fresh September harvest to replace them.

That is the useful distinction. Pumpkin spice gives autumn a recognisable flavour. Green hop gives you something the brewer could only make at harvest time.

The twelve-hour urgency belongs to the hops, incidentally. The finished beer does not turn into a pumpkin at midnight.

Before the pumpkin, the apple

If the green hop has gone, the orchard offers another way into the evening.

Daniel Maclise attended a Halloween party in Blarney in 1832 and turned it into Snap Apple Night, exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year. The Metropolitan Museum’s account of a print after the painting records the gathering behind it.

The room is full of music, games and courtship. Apples are caught with the teeth; nuts burn in the grate to test romantic prospects. In the snap-apple game, apples and lit candles were fixed to a suspended, spinning frame. Getting a mouthful of fruit required judgement about which end was coming round next.

Here is a Halloween partly obscured by the modern horror display: neighbours gathering to eat, drink and discover whom they might marry. The supernatural was being consulted on practical matters, with an audience ready to enjoy the answer.

A cider belongs comfortably in that company. It needs no secret pagan pedigree. An orchard, a harvest and a glass will do.

One cidery has put the pumpkin back. ACE of Sebastopol, founded by the man who spent years getting Fuller’s ESB into American bars before he made anything of his own, makes a pumpkin cider each autumn and calls it America’s original. Apples and pumpkin, with cinnamon, cloves and allspice. The 1771 brewer pressed a pumpkin as though it were an apple. This is the same trade running the other way.

Even the lantern is a pub story

Stingy Jack has a different arrangement with the supernatural.

In a familiar version of the legend, he persuades the Devil to join him for a drink, then proposes a way to settle the bill: turn yourself into a coin. The Devil obliges. Jack pockets him beside a cross and negotiates his release.

Eventually Jack dies. Heaven will not have him; the Devil, bound by their bargain, will not take him. He is left to wander with a burning coal inside a hollowed-out turnip.

The turnip lantern is well documented. The National Museum of Ireland holds a plaster model of one collected in Donegal in 1943, described by its donor as the kind made locally around 1900. Its pinched, miserable face makes the modern pumpkin look positively hospitable.

Jack explains the lantern beautifully. He does not provide its birth certificate. But he gives it an origin story any publican could appreciate: a customer gets clever about paying for a round, and the consequences follow him for eternity.

And the witch was a brewer, except she wasn’t

You will have met this one. Medieval alewives wore pointed hats so customers could find them at market, hung a broom outside to announce beer for sale, kept a cat for the mice in the grain and brewed in a great pot over a fire.

Hat, broom, cat, cauldron. The witch, the story goes, is just a brewster nobody liked.

It is tidy enough to remember after one pint. The pictures are less obliging.

The historian Dr Christina Wade has examined the claim. Contemporary depictions of brewing women do not establish the supposed pointed-hat uniform, and the evidence does not support tracing the modern witch’s outfit to alewives. Nor were women expelled from the trade en masse through witchcraft accusations.

What is true deserves more attention than the hat. Women did much of the domestic and small-scale brewing. Their position weakened as production became more commercial, demanding money, equipment and access to opportunities women did not enjoy on equal terms.

That is a history of work and power, spread over centuries. The costume has become more famous than the women it supposedly commemorates.

The Green Man gets a part

Then the cinema got hold of him.

The pub in The Wicker Man is the Green Man. Of course it is. Sergeant Howie walks into a place where the songs are familiar enough to be disconcerting and everyone seems to know something he does not. The inn sign has found its ideal film.

Yet Summerisle’s apparently timeless religion comes with a surprisingly practical explanation. Lord Summerisle’s Victorian grandfather encouraged the old gods while introducing new crops. The island’s customs are bound up with a landowner’s experiment in prosperity, maintained by people who have come to believe in them.

That makes the Green Man an unusually good sign for the premises: an old image carrying a history assembled around it.

The film takes place around May Day, too. Once again, we have borrowed the atmosphere for October.

For those of us raised on Shiver and Shake, Monster Fun and Rentaghost, the distance between dread and entertainment was never very great. A haunted pub could sustain a horror film or a weekly comic strip. The dead could demand a sacrifice or turn up for work.

We learnt early that a ghost story did not have to be believed to be enjoyed. Pub folklore benefits from the same arrangement.

The signs stay up

Seventy Green Men in our catalogue, twenty Green Dragons, twelve Ravens and one Hobgoblin. Before anyone hangs a plastic bat from the ceiling, the pub signs have already supplied a fairly respectable Halloween.

The pub sign is where Britain files the things it has stopped being able to explain. Sometimes the explanation survives. Sometimes a better one comes along and takes its place.

The Green Man acquired a pagan biography. Pumpkin beer acquired the flavour of pie. Jack gave a wandering light a drinking problem, and the witch acquired a previous career. These stories have different claims on the truth, but all have found somewhere comfortable at the bar.

Counts are from the PINtPOINT catalogue on 26 October 2026, taking UK pubs whose name is the sign itself or the sign followed by another word. They include a few that have closed: sixty-five of the Green Men, nineteen of the Green Dragons and eleven of the Ravens are still trading, and so is the Hobgoblin.