Gildersome parish councillors are encouraging residents to join in the unusual custom on Sunday after it was successfully revived last year.

Parish council chairwoman Coun Lesley Gettings said it was to be organised again after the first event proved so popular.

The custom of beating the bounds was once found in almost every English parish and besides its more usual name, it was also known as “riding the marches”, “riding the fringes” or “common riding”.

The custom has taken place in a variety of forms in Britain for over 2,000 years and its origins have roots in many different cultures from across Europe and beyond.

It involves villagers walking around their civic boundaries, pausing as they pass certain trees, walls and hedges that mark the boundary.

They would pray for the protection and blessings for the lands, ritually “beating” particular landmarks - or, in days gone by, young boys - with sticks. The ceremony sometimes also involved the blessing of crops or animals and the inspection of fences.

Traditionally, the vicar, usually accompanied by the churchwardens, would head a crowd of boys who, armed with either birch or willow branches would beat the parish boundaries.

The ceremony had an important practical purpose. Checking the boundaries was a way of preventing encroachment by neighbours; sometimes boundary markers would be moved, or lines obscured, and a folk memory of the true extent of the parish was necessary to maintain integrity of the borders.

Coun Gettings said: “It’s not too arduous a walk around Gildersome’s boundary, and gives us an opportunity to refresh ourselves on the beauty of our village - and the more traditional refreshment calls can be made at the Cricket Club and Griffin Head en route, of course”!

In England a parish-ale, or feast, was always held after the Beating of the Bounds, which assured its popularity, but in Henry VIII’s time, the occasion had become an excuse for so much revelry that it attracted the condemnation of a preacher who declared: “These solemne and accustomable processions and supplications be nowe growen into a right foule and detestable abuse.”

Coun Gettings said: “Well, we can’t promise such raucous revelry, but Gildersome parish councillors will serve a ploughman’s lunch in the Meeting Hall for those who complete the course, with games for the children”.

Maps for Beating the Bounds will be handed out at the start of the event at Gildersome Meeting Hall from 11am on Sunday.