The Black Pudding is the official Bury mascot. It is also the subject of an ancient and traditional ritual.

Black puddings had traditionally always been hunted in the fields and moorland around the town, and were sold on the famous Bury Market as a delicacy. Small and lithe little creatures, with their brownish-green furry coats, remarkable eyesight and razor sharp teeth, it was considered a great honour to be recognised as one of Bury's number of black pudding hunters.

However, local folklore has it that the best black pudding hunter in Bury, Arthur Bradshaw, took to trapping live black puddings and taking them home. As black puddings are prodigious breeders, a thriving black pudding farm soon sprang up in Arthur's back yard. This rapidly got out of control and many black puddings escaped to live a verminous life in the town.

Bury soon became infested with wild black puddings. They would scurry through the streets, in and out of houses, through the sewers and all around the famous Bury Market. There were so many of them, they were almost a plague. The town council would give a shilling (5p) a tail to people managed to catch one of the animals within the town. Obviously at that time, a shilling was a tidy sum - it would keep you in clogs and flat caps for a year. Anyone who caught one would wring it's neck and wave it in the air with undisguised glee.

However it soon got to the stage where this no longer had any effect of the swarming tide of vermin because the black puddings could breed faster than the people could kill them. The townsfolk just couldn't take anymore. An angry mob formed, and besieged the home of the town's official black pudding catcher, George Postlethwaite. They demanded action.

Now George was a mysterious chap, believed to have magical powers. He wasn't your usual vermin control operative. George would never use poisons or traps, but rumour had it he could charm the black puddings into a sort of trance. George was promised the freedom of the town, if he would only rescue the beleaguered population from the seething mass of furry critters. George stood in the middle of Kay Gardens and took out his penny whistle. He began to play a haunting, eerie melody and soon black puddings were appearing from everywhere. They came out of the houses, up the drains, from stables, outside toilets, pubs, shops, everywhere. Soon, George was stood in the middle of a writhing, seething, rippling blanket of greenish brown fur. He began to walk slowly out of town, with the seething mass following him. He walked all the way to Holcombe Hill, where he suddenly stopped playing. Immediately, a common fear befell the animals around him and they all disappeared down the burrows of their rural cousins, where they still live to this day.

Unfortunately, black puddings still breed relentlessly and numbers have to be kept down. Some are still killed by local hunters, skinned, boiled and sold on the market. but an official, cull is needed to ensure they never again reach plague proportions.

This has now become a tradition and every year, about this time, the menfolk of the town go out at dawn, just as the mist is clearing from the fields, for the Annual Wild Black Pudding Hunt on Holcombe Hill. The men trap and kill as many black puddings as possible and the one with the most is declared Champion Hunter for that year. In deference to the great plague, tradition decrees that all the men have to go into the pubs and wave their black puddings in the air, so that they can be officially counted. That is why people in pubs in Bury wave black puddings in the air.

As an interesting historical note, and to prove my story is true, if you go to Bury you will see that there is a pub called The George in Kay Gardens, the start of George Postlethwaite's great walk to Holcombe Hill. If you drive out of the town centre for about half a mile, towards Bolton, there is a pub on Bolton Road called The Arthur Inn. This pub is built on the site of Arthur Bradshaw's house and the yard where he had his infamous black pudding farm.

Author Credit to Mike Williams

Click here to see a picture of Mike Williams with his girlfriend

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