Falmouth Sea Shanty Festival 2025
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My photo. I completely forgot to take a pic of the parade because I was enjoying it so much. These are the Orkney Sea Shanty Society and they travelled 800 miles to take part.
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I love a good parade. Especially last Saturday morning with the Sea Shanty Festival in Falmouth for the 21st time. It’s held in support of the RNLI and raises a shocking amount of money.
The parading shanty groups formed up in their bright t-shirts, lots of them striped in blue and white, the Orkney Sea Shanty Society particularly eye-catching in their rugby shirts of red, blue and orange. A man played the bagpipes beautifully, most of the shanty groups sang different sea-shanties as they went and there was a squad of drummers who led them all with aplomb.
The streets in central Falmouth were mostly built for walking people and the occasional donkey or horse and so are very narrow. This helped with the acoustics. It didn’t help with the crowds which were immense, full of spectators, lovingly called by some Cornish people, ‘emmets’ which means ants. I don’t know exactly how many but Church Street looked like a street in an old movie before cars happened. So it was quite a feat that the parade managed to get through at all.
And there’s something atavistic and terrific and joyous about people forming up in their groups and marching down the street with good humour and the lovely tuneful growliness of male voices roaring “Heave away, haul away!” That gives me goosebumps.
By the way, I love singing sea-shanties because I am a loud singer. I sing in a choir now but alas, the printed music is often bespattered with the injunction ‘piano, pp and ppp.’ which means soft, softer and softest and just sprains my vocal cords.
But at the Sea Shanty Festival I can sing as loud as I like because everyone else is singing loudly too because that’s the point. Got to be heard above the storm as ye haul in the mainsail, Cap’n.
Loud. It always cheers me up.
Except when the Bryher Boys’ soloist gets up and sings the unbearably sad ‘Last Leviathan’ and I dissolve into tears (a very ugly sight, let me tell you), until I’m basically a puddle on the floor. I always do this, I can’t help it.
Yes, the song is about the whalers killing the last whale. Afterwards there is a solemn injunction saying the whales are back but we have to keep an eye on things. Boy, is that true.
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