A 12-foot tall Wicker Man will be set on fire tonight in a pagan winter ritual close to the Fermanagh border.

The folk ceremony at Aughakillymaude Mummers Centre near Derrylin will celebrate the loosening of winter’s grip and the impending return of spring as it marks February 1, known as a Quarter Day in the Celtic agricultural calendar.

At 10pm the straw mummers hats worn all winter by the troupe performing their traditional drama will be set on fire to mark the close of the mumming season and the Wicker Man will then be lit.

The huge figure has been created by model maker Gordon Johnston from flexible sally rods — willow rods used for wicker furniture and fencing. According to Jim Ledwith of the Mummers Foundation, little is known about the origins of the Wicker Man, apart from Julius Caesar’s second hand accounts of druidic winter rituals of human sacrifice during the Gallic wars.

These alleged that female slaves and criminals were burned alive inside effigies 100 times the size of the Fermanagh one.

“While the details of the wicker man ritual may have become coloured with the telling, it represents a tradition of sacrifice by burning practiced by the continental Celts.

“Indeed, the practice of human sacrifice was still prevalent in fifth and sixth century Ireland,” Jim said.

“Throughout Celtic Europe the wicker man legend lives on and the effigy is still burned ceremoniously as a mock sacrifice in themed ceremonies, especially at Beltaine (May) to mark the rite of spring — notably without the human sacrifice element.”

Mummers will light a gas beacon at Aughakillymaude to symbolise the sun’s return.

The 1973 movie Wicker Man, starring Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee, is regarded as one of the finest horror films of all time, and it ends with Woodward, playing a police detective, being burned alive inside the chest of the effigy.