Like Sergeant Howie, the policeman sent to a remote Scottish island in the original 1973 horror flick, the creators of Singalong Wickerman have clearly been cursed. From 2009’s ill-fated Beachdown Festival to last week’s scheduling mix-up at Free Range, they’ve suffered no less than five cancellations in a year.

The latest last-minute change made for a small audience, but this failed to snuff out our hosts’ flesh-burning fires. After issuing the congregation with pagan hymnbooks and goodie bags, “Lord Summerisle” and “Willow” had us fervently miming fertility symbols, feeding our neighbours frogs, and “re-consecrating the venue” with criss-crossed lolly sticks.

Compared to the longer-established Singalong-a-Sound-of-Music, this venture felt homemade and low-budget − and was all the better for it. With no on-screen subtitles our instructions came solely from hand-written signs (“Commence orgy now” was a particular favourite), producing an atmosphere as intimate as if we’d been rubbing groins in the Green Man Inn itself.

For the uninitiated, this motley gathering of oddballs chanting along to a mock-religious 1970s musical must have seemed perplexing; anyone not a diehard fan of the film would have been climbing the walls. But the rest of us − many sporting animal ears and sacrificial smocks − went home to delightedly thump them.

Colette Bernhardt