The Barley Mow ~ Hume
The Barley Mow ~ Hume is an English Country Dance. It was published by Thompson in 1779 in Twenty four Country Dances for the year 1779. It was interpreted by Colin Hume (website) in 2025 and published in Colin Hume's Website. Originally a Triple Minor this version is a proper 3 Couple Longways dance. In this dance the couples are permuted by: 231. The minor set lasts 64 bars. The tune is a jig. An online description of the dance may be found here.
Hands round 3 with the 2d. Wo. the same with the 2d. Man Cross over & half figure lead thro' the bottom and cast up hands 3 round Man at Bottom & Wo. at top at the same time Hey the same hands six half round & back again Allemand half round and back again
The tune was published by Thompson with the dance and the music was synthesized using Colin Hume's software.
The animation plays at 113 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: hand turn (allemande), circle, cast, lead, figure eight, hey, hey for three, lead and cast, arming, cross go below, (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=TheBarleyMow-Hume
The dance itself is out of copyright, and is in the public domain. The interpretation is copyright © 2025 by Colin Hume. 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.