Cannock Chase
Inspired by Keith Rose's Crib Diagrams, for Playford style dances I have added a few extra symbols.
Cannock Chase is an English Country Dance. It was devised by Charles Bolton (website) in 1991 and published in People and Places. It is a 3 Couple Longways dance with the 1s improper. In this dance the couples are permuted by: 312. The minor set lasts 32 bars. The tune is a jig. It is in the key: G Major. An online description of the dance may be found here.
The tune was composed by Charles Bolton for the dance. It was performed by Dave Bartley, Ruthie Dornfeld and Terry Wergeland for the Seattle English Country Dance Ball, 2025. The music is used with permission from the performers.
The animation plays at 116 counts per minute normally, but the first time through the set the dance will often be slowed down so people can learn the moves more readily (no music plays during this slow set). Men are drawn as rectangles, women as ellipses. Each couple is drawn in its own color, however the border of each dancer indicates what role they currently play so the border color may change each time through the minor set.
The dances of Charles Bolton (including this one) are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license by the CDSS Online Library.
| A1 | 1-4 | All, right shoulder round partner |
| 5-8 | Top and bottom men cast, and chased by partners, dance clockwise halfway round (into each other's places) | |
| A2 | 1-4 | Top two couples circle half, and California twirl |
| 5-8 | Bottom two couples circle half, and California twirl | |
| B | 1-8 | End couples cast, middles lead up, morris mirror hey |
| 9-12 | Top couple cast down, others follow to invert the set | |
| 13-16 | Face partner, set forward, and turn single right back |
If you find what you believe to be a mistake in this animation, please leave a comment on youtube explaining what you believe to be wrong. If I agree with you I shall do my best to fix it.
If you wish to link to this animation please see my comments on the transience of my youtube URLs. You may freely link to this page, of course, and that should have no problems, but use one of my redirects when linking to the youtube video itself:
https://www.upadouble.info/redirect.php?id=CannockChase
The dance is copyright © 1991 by Charles Bolton. And is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license. My visualization of this dance is copyright © 2026 by George W. Williams V and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike: CC BY-NC-SA license.
This website is copyright © 2021-2026 by George W. Williams V
My work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Most of the dances have more restrictive licensing, see my notes on copyright, the individual dance pages should mention when some rights are waived.