New Year's Tyre Tracks--A Dream Ritual

I had a dream the other night which featured an old Anglo-Saxon New Year's tradition--the tyre track--which is in all likelyhood spun whole cloth from my brain-meats, but seems plausible and entertaining nonetheless, so I present some world-building, free to a good home:

Fundamentally, it involves the creation of geometric pathway--the tyre track--either in the form of a trench, or a trail of squared off stones.

The path starts at a water source--this might be a natural spring, a dripping cliff or overhang, or if nothing natural can be found, a dripping tap or punctured barrel.  In the Northern Hemisphere it might be started under an icicle, that will start melting by firelight that night.

Originally, the path was a trench down which the water would flow, and keeping the sides straight and turns perfectly normal was a big part of the competition; but now squared off stongs are fitted into the trench, and the game is in the complexity of the path.  At some corners larger square ashars are laid, with outlying stones, these are referred to as accumulators.

The creation of the tyre tracks, and their maintenance into the night, was a primarily male affair, but there was also a specific female role--one woman would be in charge of the revels at night--she would wear a dress with wooden accents on the bodice, sample all drinks, and have final approval on all toasts.  She would also, in some sort of sacrifical king thing, be beaten with broom-sticks.  The beatings were abandoned fairly early, replaced with spanking with the broom head.  By the modern day, this was not a singular role, rather women would take a flask of liquor and a straw duster, and go from tyre track to tyre track, judging them, and dispensing drinks or spankings as necessary.

There are a few stories of how the tradition started.  In the simpler, three siblings observe trees and lightning reflected in a perfectly still lake, and are inspired by the figures they see.

In the more complex, two brothers see their mother across a river.  The river is low, so they ford it to talk to her, and she tells them to go home immediately.  The brothers cross back over the river, but then it rises suddenly and their mother cannot ford it.  She gestures at them to continue home, and when they get there they find their mother is dead.  They rush back to the riverbank, and seeing their mother on the other side realise that the other side is the other side.  The river is still too high for thier mother to cross back over, so they start to dig trenches to try and lower the river so that she might cross back to the world of the living.  To this day they are still trying.

I was also looking for a poem about a single goose, that I felt would explain the tradition more fully, but now that I am awake I realise poems about geese are much Chinese than Saxon.  The other part that seems incorrect now that I wake up is the explanation of the term tyre track, this I had said was because the trenches were formed by dragging heavy weights in the earth, and that tow path would be another translation from the Old English, but waking dictionaries inform me that tow and tyre are etymologically unrelated.