Most people know the big dates: Christmas, Halloween, Bonfire Night. The older, stranger seam of the year runs underneath them, stitched to saints' days, harvests, the turning of the light and a healthy suspicion of the dark. Follow it for twelve months and you will find wassailers singing to apple trees in a Somerset orchard, a hooded horse dancing through the streets of Padstow, and a bell rung once for every year since the Nativity.

What follows is an itinerary, not a rulebook. Dates shift with Easter and with local custom, and plenty of these traditions survive in a single village or a single street. Treat it as a way of knowing what is coming, then check parish noticeboards, town council listings and the local pub to find out whether it is happening this year.

January and February: the quiet, uncanny months

The year opens with luck-bringing. In Scotland and the north of England, first-footing still decides the temper of the coming twelve months: a tall, dark-haired visitor crossing the threshold after midnight, ideally carrying coal, bread, salt or a dram. Shetland's Up Helly Aa, held on the last Tuesday of January, ends with hundreds of torches and a burning galley — a spectacle that owes more to nineteenth-century Victorian imagination than to the Vikings.

Twelfth Night brings wassailing, and the apple orchards of Somerset and Kent keep the old form: cider-soaked toast placed in the branches, shotguns fired through the wood, songs sung to encourage a good crop. Carhampton in Somerset holds its wassail on Old Twelfth Night, 17 January, while Haxey in Lincolnshire marks 6 January by shoving a leather hood across the fields in a cheerful, muddy scrum.

February is Candlemas on the 2nd, with its weather lore — a fair, bright day is said to promise more winter — and Shrove Tuesday, which moves with Easter. Ashbourne in Derbyshire plays its Royal Shrovetide Football across two days, and Olney in Buckinghamshire still runs its pancake race. Look out for St Agnes' Eve on 20 January, when the old divinations involved pins, fasting and a hope of dreaming of a future spouse.

March to May: the year wakes up

St David's Day on 1 March, St Patrick's Day on the 17th and St George's Day on 23 April give the spring its saints. Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent, was once the day servants walked home to their mother church, taking a simnel cake. Easter then delivers a cluster of rough, joyous customs: the Britannia Coconut Dancers of Bacup on Easter Saturday, and the Hare Pie Scramble and bottle kicking at Hallaton in Leicestershire on Easter Monday.

May Day is the great hinge. Padstow's 'Obby 'Oss dances through Cornwall on 1 May; Hastings has its Jack in the Green; Oxford's Magdalen Tower choir sings at six in the morning. In Edinburgh and elsewhere, Beltane fires are lit on the night of 30 April. Older still is the habit of washing the face in May dew before sunrise — said to bring beauty for the year — and the revival of chimney sweep processions in Rochester and Whitby.

The movable feasts matter here. Ascension Day brings Tissington's well dressing in Derbyshire, when wells are dressed with pictures made from petals, leaves and seeds. Rogationtide, just before, was when parishes beat the bounds, walking the boundary with sticks to remember where it lay.

June to August: light and fire

Midsummer belongs to fire and to herbs. St John's Eve on 23 June brought bonfires on hillsides, and Penzance's Golowan festival revives the mood with lanterns, quayside fires and a mock mayor. Traditional midsummer divination — stones laid in a circle, fern seed gathered at midnight — is the sort of thing better read about than attempted in a neighbour's field.

St Swithin's Day on 15 July carries the famous forty-day weather prophecy, worth repeating only with a raised eyebrow. Lammas on 1 August marked the first loaf from the new grain, and the weeks that follow are harvest: corn dollies woven from the last sheaf, harvest suppers, and the hiring fairs and wakes that gave Lancashire and Yorkshire their annual holidays.

September to November: harvest and the threshold

Michaelmas on 29 September was a quarter day for rents, a goose on the table and hiring fairs for farm servants. The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance in Staffordshire, performed with reindeer antlers on Wakes Monday in early September, is one of the oldest-surviving processions of its kind.

Then comes the threshold. Halloween on 31 October is the Christian name for Samhain, the start of the dark half of the year, and much of what we do now is nineteenth-century and older mixed together: turnip lanterns, guising, apple bobbing, souling songs sung door to door in Cheshire and Lancashire. In parts of the north it was Nut-crack Night, a time for roasting nuts on the hearth and reading the future in how they burned.

Bonfire Night on 5 November took over the firelight, and Martinmas on the 11th was the old slaughter month, when salt beef went into the barrel and hiring fairs settled accounts.

December: the long nights

The solstice on or around 21 December is marked at Stonehenge and by Penzance's Montol festival, with its guise dancing and lantern procession. Mumming plays appear in the weeks around Christmas — St George, a Turkish knight, a doctor with a bottle — performed in pubs, village halls and front rooms.

Dewsbury rings its Devil's Knell on Christmas Eve, once for every year since the Nativity. On St Stephen's Day, 26 December, the Isle of Man and parts of Ireland remember Hunting the Wren. And between Christmas and Twelfth Night, the Mari Lwyd — a horse skull on a pole, ribbons and all — tours Welsh doorsteps, challenging households to a rhyming contest before being let in.

Movable feasts to check each year

A few of the best dates cannot be printed in advance. Work them out early and put them in the diary:

• Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday — 47 and 46 days before Easter.
• Mothering Sunday — the fourth Sunday in Lent.
• Easter Saturday and Monday — Bacup, Hallaton and other local games.
• Ascension Day — well dressing at Tissington and beyond.
• Whitsun — seven weeks after Easter, still a favourite for well dressings and fairs.
• Wakes weeks — set locally, often tied to a patron saint's day.

How to follow the year without chasing it

Start with the fixed dates above and pick two or three that fall within reasonable reach. Then find out whether they are actually being kept: the parish magazine, the town council website, the village shop noticeboard and the local history society are far more reliable than any national listing.

A few practical habits help. Arrive early, because processions and dances are short. Wear boots that can take mud and stand back from the action. Carry cash for collections and raffles. Ask before photographing participants, especially children and anyone in costume, and never touch a mask, a hobby horse or a decorated well. Where fire is involved, follow the stewards and keep well clear of the torches.

Above all, go as a guest rather than a collector. Buy a pint, listen to the singing, and let someone explain the rules of the game you have wandered into. The British year rewards curiosity, patience and a willingness to stand about in the cold.

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