‘HERE'S two or three jolly boys all in one mind, we’ve come a pace egging, we hope you’ feel kind ‘ran a rough chorus sung at Eastertide by local youths as they, performed a drama in retuned for pace eggs.

The boiled hens’ eggs, not the over wrapped chocolate confections of today, were supposed to symbolise new life which sprung from Jesus’ Resurrection on Easter Day.

Hence, ‘pace’ is said to derive from ‘pasque,’ a Latin name for a feast.

The eggs were generally dyed with bright cloths but at Heversham they were boiled in daffodil leaves which produced a marble effect.

They were traditionally rolled on Easter Monday which at Burton occurred on the Vicarage Field while at Kendal, the venue was the slopes below the Castle where, after the event in 1919, the Gazette reported ‘the hill resembled a rubbish tip covered with bits of paper, egg shell and orange peel.

The Jolly Boys were equally unseemly especially when they introduced modern characters like cowboys to take on the Dragon in place of St. George.

They were still going round Milnthorpe, Sedgwick, New Hutton and Sedbergh in the 1950’s but ten years later they had become a folk memory.