Traditional Fenland dancers raising money for cancer charity with six-week dance challenge

A Peterborough dance group is raising money for charity with a new six-week dance challenge.

Pig Dyke Molly, who are a traditional Fenland dancing group, are giving people six weeks to learn three dances, which they will later perform in public to raise money for the Macmillan cancer charity.

The group is inviting people to join them on Monday evenings at the Fletton Ex-Service and Working Men’s Club, on Fletton High Street, from September 12 to learn the dances, before performing them at Nene Valley Railway on October 23.

"It’s an opportunity to have some fun by taking on the challenge to learn some dances and then to perform them,” Tony Forster, Pig Dyke Molly’s founder, said.

"The aim will be to raise as much money for charity as possible.

“Pig Dyke Molly has a long 20-year history of raising money for Macmillan. We started originally because one of our members had lost her sister to cancer and said she would be really pleased if we could raise some money for them.”

Tony founded Pig Dyke Molly 30 years ago.

"Molly dancing was a mid-winter tradition,” he said. “The story is that it was a begging custom for people who couldn’t work during mid-winter.

"People dressed in funny clothes and danced where they could. It died out before the First Word War, but it was revived around the 1970s and 1980s.”

For more information, contact Pig Dyke Molly via its Facebook page by clicking here.