Girls’ carnival morris dancing from the northwest of England is the performance that started it all, for me.

Growing up as the daughter of a morris dancer, I was always told that women didn’t morris dance. Or if they did, it was an abomination, an effrontery from the ‘Women’s Lib’ movement of the 1970s.

So it was something of a surprise to me, as a fledgling researcher poring through the archives, to find old, black-and-white photographs of teams of women and girls doing something called ‘morris dancing’ as early as the 1880s. Unique to Manchester, Merseyside, Cheshire, Lancashire and the North of Wales, girls’ morris dancing was written out of the history books, excluded from the narratives that came to characterise the English folk movement. But it thrived nonetheless.

Today there are hundreds of troupes, thousands of dancers, mostly teenaged girls, who dance in competitions held across the region. They perform to pop music, re-design their dresses as often as funds allow, and continually innovate with the tradition that has been passed down through generations of women. The performance is as old as any other kind of morris in the area, probably in the country, in spite of popular but unfounded claims to ancient pagan origins for the men’s morris of the folk revival.