The John Knill ceremony St Ives performs once every five years

Set your calendar by it and you will still only catch it a handful of times in a lifetime. Once every five years, and only once every five years, St Ives climbs a wooded hill above the town and ten girls in white dresses dance around a granite steeple to a lone fiddler. This Saturday, 25 July, is one of those days.

The 46th John Knill Celebrations revive a piece of civic theatre that has run, five years apart, since 1801. It survives for one reason. A man wrote it into his will and left the money to keep it going. Miss it on Saturday and the next chance does not come around until July 2031.

What happens on the day

The running order is set almost to the minute. The official party assembles at the War Memorial Gardens at 10:30, and the Mayor of St Ives introduces the ceremonies at 10:40. At 11:00 the procession sets off through the middle of town, up High Street, Tregenna Place, Tregenna Hill and Fernlea Terrace, to the Malakoff. From there, at 11:15, the party boards coaches for the ride out to Steeple Woods on Worvas Hill.

The heart of it comes at 12:30. The Master of Ceremonies opens proceedings at the foot of the monument, the fiddler strikes up, and the Dance according to John Knill begins. The whole gathering then sings the Old Hundredth Psalm, the one that opens “All people that on Earth do dwell”. At 13:30 the party returns to the Malakoff and processes back down through town by way of Skidden Hill and St Andrew’s Street. It finishes at the Memorial Gardens at 14:00, where the Mayor thanks everyone who keeps the tradition going.

It is free and open to all, and the organisers make a point of saying so. Anyone who wants to see the dance itself should head for Steeple Woods for midday. Anyone who prefers the pageantry can line the procession route in town. The walk up the hill is worth a decent pair of shoes.

Who is taking part

This year’s mayor, Councillor Andrew Mitchell, officiates as one of the three Knill Trustees, alongside the Vicar of St Ives, the Reverend Dr Nicholas Widdows, and Customs Officer Nick Jackson. Andrew was born in the town. “It is such an honour and privilege for me to be Mayor of St Ives during this quaint, historic ceremony,” he writes in the souvenir programme. “As I was born in St Ives, the Knill Ceremony has been part of my life growing up in the town.” Pointing to the words Nil Desperandum, or Never Despair, carved into the monument, he adds that “those words were never more apt than they are in the world we currently find ourselves living in”.

The Master of Ceremonies is Charles Guppy, taking part in his third Knill celebration. “A warm welcome to all, townsfolk and visitors alike,” he writes. He calls the day “a vital link with former times and ways of life, as well as interesting history for those who come after us”. The fiddle player is Katrina Geraghty, born in St Ives and a music teacher for more than thirty years, including eleven at St Ives School, who now plays with the Celtic Fiddlers in Hayle. Fifteen local girls take the role of the Maids who dance around the steeple, with Trudie Pearce and Elizabeth Veal as the two Widows.

Nick Jackson, the Customs Officer, has worked the role for real across Devon and Cornwall for more than twenty years. “This is something that’s been going on since 1801, and it’s a thrill to be part of something so ingrained in the history of Cornwall and, in particular, St Ives,” he says. “I imagine John Knill and his ‘Excise men’ patrolling treacherous hidden coves on horseback, intercepting smugglers and seizing illicit contraband. It’s not actually too different from what we do today, but it would have been a lot more hazardous.”

There is a new keepsake this year too. The Maids each receive a bespoke Silver Knill necklace, cast by St Ives maker Kirsty Bridgewater and stamped with the year 2026 in the silhouette of the steeple. A Cornish-language blessing has also been written for the occasion by Raymond Bridgewater, Cornish Bard and Mace Bearer.

The man behind the monument

John Knill is a genuinely odd figure to build a town tradition around, and much of his reputation is tangled up in smuggling folklore. He was customs officer for the Port of St Ives for two decades, from 1762 to 1782, and people have argued ever since about where his loyalties lay. The picture that emerges from press reports of the day, including the Sherborne Mercury, is stranger than the legend. Rather than a smuggler, John appears to have been a backer of privateers, privately owned armed vessels among them the Greyhound, the Brilliant and the Desire of St Ives, that hunted smugglers instead of joining them. As principal owner and agent, he took his share of the prize money.

He was, by the account in this year’s programme, a diligent public servant. Elected Mayor of St Ives in 1762, he was the first to record every expense of his term in the borough account book, citing the instruction to “let all things be done decently and in order”. One contemporary historian, Davies Gilbert, remembered him as tender-hearted, showing “every kindness in his power” to French prisoners taken by his ships and restoring their property at his own expense. The persistent tale that his old house on Fore Street was riddled with smugglers’ tunnels running to Porthmeor and up to Tregenna Castle is, on the programme’s own reckoning, almost certainly just a tale.

John built the granite steeple on Worvas Hill in 1782 as his intended burial place, though in the end he was never laid to rest there. Two and a half centuries on, the monument still stands against the Atlantic winds above the town, and the woodland around it has become the Steeple Woodland Nature Reserve, where volunteers have planted more than 4,000 native trees since 1999 and help prepare the ground for each ceremony.

Born simply John Knill, as the programme puts it, he died still simply John Knill, with no recognition of a lifetime of service to King and Country. In life he seems to have been a largely private man. And yet, every fifth July, St Ives climbs the hill for him, the fiddle plays and the children dance.

Charles Guppy, for one, already has his eye on the one after this. “Thank you for your interest and support today,” he tells the crowd, “and we all look forward to seeing you in July 2031.”