Thanks for that Steve.
I agree entirely - though as far as I'm concerned anything that promotes discussion can't be bad.
An example of what you are talking about happened some time ago around here. A friend of ours - you have met him - decided to have an extension to his house built as they were getting very short of space. When he broached the subject with his wife she opposed the idea point blank as the only direction they could possibly have built was to the West, which, according to her, was very bad luck - she said it was where the the saying 'gone west' came from. He, as a folklorist, had never heard of it, I certainly haven't, nor have I been able to find any reference to it. The extension never got built.

I don't know if you are conversant with what happened at Padstow - probably one of the most solidly based traditions in the UK.
Sometime in the (I think) the nineteen twenties it all but died out. Doc Rowe once gave a talk we attended at Battersea Library, where he showed a slide of a wonderful photograph of one old man who had put on the 'Oss costume and walked through the town on his own just to keep it alive. The photograph shows the bystanders in their Edwardian clothes, staring at him as if he had just stepped out of a space-ship; it came that close to dying out altogether.
Jim Carroll