Wicker Man

Or is it a Sin Eater? The burning of this large effigy was the culmination of the Sin Eater music festival at the Bridges Inn, which sits down in the valley between Long Mynd and Stiperstones, and feels suitably far from civilisation for this kind of pagan carrying-on. The nearby village of Ratlinghope (which locals might call Ratchup) is said to be the home of the last practising Sin Eater in England, or maybe Britain. According to wikipedia, a Sin Eater was a person, usually a beggar, who would ritually take on the sins of the recently deceased by eating bread that had been placed on the corpse and drinking ale passed over it in a bowl. The practise of burning a large effigy (with a chest of sins (written on slips of paper) placed inside it) seems to owe more to the Wicker Man ritual than the original Sin Eating, but to be fair it was a lot more spectacular than someone eating bread next to a corpse, which might also pose some ethical and health and safety issues.