Women move differently - its just a plain fact, their proportions are different, their limbs are jointed differently - and as soon as an infant gets up on its hind legs there is a visible difference between the sexes.

Ok, some men are definitely effeminate in their movements - my older son, 6ft 4inches and he works out, but he runs like a big girl's blouse - and some women dance vigorously, but all that has nothing to do with how the Morris Ring conducts itself.

Some sides were reconstructed after the first world war - according to the folk law, because some of the sisters of those who did not return from the war had assisted their brothers in practising the dances.

I don't know how accurate the song 'The Ladies go dancing at Whitsun' is - or if it is supose to include Cotswold Morris, but it does seem to indicate that the original tradition of dancing as part of the yearly cycle was carried on by the distaff side.

I had a number of elderly female relatives who never married because there were no men to marry. My grandfather was tiny - so small he was not taken for the army. He went to sign on with the other lads from the village, and had to walk all the way back alone, and slept under a hedge - he played Little Devil Doubt, but no one else in the play survived the war....

But recent history is probably of little interest to the organisers of the Morris Ring. It is their club, if they want it to be all male that is their privilage. If there are sides who make spectacles of themselves refusing to associate with women dancers - well there are greater mysogenists, and who knows, all this rapid climate change in the last hundred years might actually be due to women dancing the morris and not greenhouse gasses at all. All those glaciers melting - dead significant if you think about it.

If the Morris ring is eventually reduced to a few sides and some old men in cardigans looking after their library and other resources - well - so what?

If the Morris Ring gets political and takes over the government, legislates against women dancing or playing music - that would be interesting, so would the consequences.

We can't preserve anything for ever, and people are dancing the morris, perhaps without the discipline, or the finesse, or the rationale of the old sides, but it is not lost, just different.

It isn't something that can be controlled, people aged from two to ninety two dance on the sea front at Sidmouth - they dance like maidens or madmen - and anything in betweeen.

It's the beat.

The beat goes on.

I wonder why they called themselves the Morris RING....