Brackaville, five minutes ago

Brackaville, the most pagan village in the northern hemisphere, is today celebrating the longest day in the year by having their biggest party yet according to the postman, Leo McClure. Bonfires lit the landscape coming out of Coalisland up the Brackaville Road from as early as 6am with reports of men and women ‘buck leapin about drinking clear stuff from mineral bottles’.

“Frig me. I’ve been delivering letters up the Brackaville Road for years and thought I’d seen it all. But this morning, it was like a big mad frenzied orgy thing even though there was none of that stuff going on. Just men and wemen leaping about a bonfire buck naked shouting just ‘yahoooo’ and stuff like that. Some of them were teachers, doctors, chapel cleaners and all. They love their midsummer up there, them pagans.”

The name Brackaville itself derives from the old Latin ‘Brak a Vil’ which means Heathens on the Hill. Paganism in the area has been rife since the late 1700s with reports of mad dancing and yahooing in old newspapers at the time. Chief Summer Solstice organiser, Harry Gillis, told us:

“Ah you should see the wee children’s faces this morning when they woke up to hear that it was midsummer. It’s even better than Christmas which we don’t believe in but do it anyway for the craic. How often do you get to see Mrs Campbell out in her bra dancing about and singing songs about goats and flowers? It’s a special day. Them believers down in Coalisland are fierce jealous. Them with their oul sad heads trapsing to the chapel to be told about damnation and looking up the road and seeing the sights up here. It must be tough for them.”

The one-day festival ends at midnight after the sacred ritual of capturing someone from Coalisland and Newmills, placing them in a pot of water and pretending to sacrifice them before letting them go just as the water reaches lukewarm.