The event comes from an old local story. It’s said that one cold April a local farmer placed a large log on his hearth to warm himself when a cuckoo flew out from the inside the log, loudly calling “cuckoo”. The farmer caught the bird and placed it in a cage, gathering his friends and a number of musicians to join him in parading the bird around the village in celebration.
In Cornish dialect the violin is called a “crowd”, and sometimes this feast was called “crowder feast”. Because Towednack had no parish feast at the time, which was very unusual in Cornwall, the locals decided to keep this date as their community celebration. It was the tradition that the feast could not take place unless a cuckoo was heard locally. The cuckoo is an important symbol of spring in many places and the story of the cuckoo in the log may just be a legend associated with the return of warmth and the birth of a new season.
