Flowers of Edinburgh - Mayfaire
Inspired by Keith Rose's Crib Diagrams, for Playford style dances I have added a few extra symbols.
Flowers of Edinburgh - Mayfaire is an English Country Dance. It is a traditional dance with no clear origin. It was interpreted by sometime before 2026-02-26. It is a proper Duple Minor dance. The minor set lasts 32 bars.
I cannot figure out the provenance of this dance. The initial full figure of eight matches Asa Wilcox's version of the dance (from the US, ~1793), while the last 16 bars match the version published by the (R)SCDS in Book 1 (said to come from J. P. Boulogne's The Ball-Room, or the Juvenile Pupil's Assistant, 1827). But in both cases the rest of the dance is quite different from what we have here.
The tune is a traditional Scottish one. It was synthesized using Colin Hume's software.
The animation plays at 111 counts per minute normally, but the first time through the set the dance will often be slowed down so people can learn the moves more readily (no music plays during this slow set). Men are drawn as rectangles, women as ellipses. Each couple is drawn in its own color, however the border of each dancer indicates what role they currently play so the border color may change each time through the minor set.
The dance contains the following figures: cast, lead, figure eight, poussette, hey, hey for four, down the middle and back (and probably others).
If you find what you believe to be a mistake in this animation, please leave a comment on youtube explaining what you believe to be wrong. If I agree with you I shall do my best to fix it.
If you wish to link to this animation please see my comments on the transience of my youtube URLs. You may freely link to this page, of course, and that should have no problems, but use one of my redirects when linking to the youtube video itself:
https://www.upadouble.info/redirect.php?id=FlowersOfEdinburgh-Mayfaire
I do not have a publication date for the dance and do not know whether it is under copyright or not. I do not have a date for the interpretation, so it may be under copyright. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2026 by George W. Williams V and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This website is copyright © 2021-2026 by George W. Williams V
My work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Most of the dances have more restrictive licensing, see my notes on copyright, the individual dance pages should mention when some rights are waived.