With refreshingly scant regard for their own safety, young and old villagers alike heave flaming barrels of tar on to their backs and haul them through the streets.
Trainees were sometimes mowed down in live-fire exercises; others were burned alive during rope drills over flaming barrels of gasoline.
I'm getting ready for tonight's Ottery St Mary flaming tar barrels ceremony (tarbarrels.co.uk), which dates from the 17th century.
Tradition has it that on 5 November the people of Ottery St Mary shall run through the streets of the town carrying flaming 30kg barrels of tar above their heads.
New Year's and hogmanay, flaming tar barrels and Siberian ice divers.
And just down the road to the southwest, in Ottery St. Mary, East Devon, folks race through the night hoisting flaming wooden barrels of tar over their heads.
Then it was out on to the downs where we immediately stumbled across the town's obelisk, a stone monument to the 17 protestant martyrs burned at the stake in the mid-16th century – they are commemorated today in the town's famous Guy Fawkes night celebrations, when tar barrels, flaming crosses and a giant bonfire draw crowds of up to 80,000.
Turbo Charge Donkey Kong, dressed in a flaming stuntman outfit, lobs barrel, but can also play the bongos to incapacitate groups of foes – a reference to the Donkey Konga game.
To hold on to power, the regime has employed all manner of violence: barrels of flaming oil dropped on civilian areas, mass torture, poison gas.
Bolton Steam Museum, Sat & Sun Colette Bernhardt Allendale Tar Bar'l Ceremony, Nr Hexham, New Year's Eve This small village in Northumberland welcomes a midnight procession of men, AKA guisers, in fancy dress, carrying whisky barrels of flaming tar which later get thrown on a bonfire.
