The three days immediately before Ascension Day are traditionally kept in the Western church as Rogation Days, a period of processional prayer for the blessing of crops and fields that predates the Ascension feast's own liturgical elaboration and that survived in some parishes as the folk custom of beating the bounds, in which parishioners walked the boundary of the parish together, marking landmarks and sometimes striking them with sticks, a practice that doubled as an oral record of property lines in an age before reliable maps and surveys.
The custom declined sharply with agricultural change and the weakening of the parish as the basic unit of English rural life, but a number of Church of England and some other parishes have deliberately kept or revived beating the bounds as a community and heritage event, walking the boundary and reciting prayers much as their medieval predecessors did, so that a small number of communities each spring still tie a genuinely ancient agricultural blessing custom to the run-up of a feast whose own explicit content, the withdrawal of Christ into heaven, has nothing directly to do with crops or boundaries at all.
In Germany, Ascension Day has acquired an entirely secular second life as Vatertag, Father's Day, an informal men's outing tradition in which groups pull small wagons loaded with drink through the countryside, a custom with no official religious content that nonetheless depends entirely on the church's fixed Thursday holiday for its date, so that the same public holiday now serves, for many Germans, a purely secular springtime social occasion running alongside, and largely independent of, the liturgical observance described above.