Crying the Neck

Crying The Neck is a harvest festival tradition once common in counties of Devon and Cornwall in the United Kingdom, in which a farm worker holds aloft the final handful of cut corn and a series of calls are chanted.

The tradition declined following the invention of machines such as the combine harvester, but despite this has persisted into modern times across Devon and Cornwall albeit to a more limited extent. In Devon the tradition was still recorded as occurring regularly on the Exmoor coast in 1950, and more recently has seen reintroduction elsewhere such as Stoke where it occurs annually alongside the Village Summer Fair. In Cornwall there was an organised revival of the practice on five farms in the 20 years after the Second World War by the Old Cornwall Society, which still organises most events where the tradition is practised to this day.