 The idea that the custom had pre-Christian roots helped to convert it into a tourist attraction.This idea of the custom as an pre-Christian one percolated into the Padstow community, for when the historian Ronald Hutton visited the town in 1985 he found locals describing it to him as an ancient pagan fertility rite.In the 1950s Alan Lomax, then in London and working for the BBC, and his collaborator Peter Kennedy of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, decided to document the unique May Eve and May Day Festivals at Padstow, they selected George Pickow to be their cameraman.