April 2026
England's relationship with Easter is older and stranger and more layered than the modern holiday suggests. Long before it became a long weekend and a chocolate exchange, it was the hinge of the church year, the end of Lent, the first major communal celebration after the compressed quiet of winter. Some of what remains from that time is well known. Much of it is not.
The egg precedes Christianity in the English spring calendar by a considerable distance. It stood for renewal and the return of warmth in ways that the church eventually absorbed rather than replaced. The practice of pace-egging — in which children would go door to door in parts of northern England asking for eggs, sometimes wearing elaborate costumes and performing short folk plays — survived in some form into the twentieth century in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and traces of it persist still in certain villages.
The simnel cake is the confection of the season: a rich fruit cake with two layers of marzipan, one baked inside and one placed on top, decorated with eleven balls of marzipan representing the apostles minus Judas. It was traditionally made on Mothering Sunday — the fourth Sunday of Lent — and carried home by domestic servants visiting their families. The association with Easter itself came later, but the cake remained.
Hot cross buns carry a more contested history. The spiced, fruit-studded bun marked with a cross was associated with Good Friday and with the end of the Lenten fast — the spices, the fruit and the slight sweetness representing a significant departure from weeks of plain food. Bakers in London were regulated as to when they could sell them; a royal decree in the sixteenth century restricted their sale to Good Friday, Christmas and burials. The rule did not hold, but the bun persists.
In the Cotswolds, Easter Monday was once the occasion for traditional games — including, in some parishes, elaborate egg-rolling competitions down hillsides. The village of Olveston in Gloucestershire maintained its annual Pace Egg play well into the nineteenth century. These are the threads that connect what feels like a modern family holiday to something much longer and stranger underneath.
Travelling in England at Easter means encountering the country in a particular mood: the hedgerows just coming through, the light changing by the day, church flowers in every village, the pubs busy with people who have been waiting since January for a reason to be outside. It is one of the better times to be here.
We design England journeys for all seasons. Easter, with its particular combination of ancient ritual and renewed light, is among the most rewarding.