Freshers' Week at Ashworth runs for the five days before Michaelmas term begins and is structured around a deliberate mix of integration and humiliation. The week opens with the Crossing, a ceremony where new students walk through the main gate in single file and are greeted by the university principal and the Master of the Horse, who presents each of them with a small wooden token engraved with the university's crest – a tradition that dates to 1898 and was originally intended to mark the transition from secondary education to university life. The token is meant to be carried at all times during the first term, though most students lose theirs within the first week and the replacement fee is a source of perennial complaint. The week continues with a series of social events organised by the student union, including a pub night at the Plough and Harrow, a formal dinner in the Galahad Room, and a sports fair where new students can sign up for various teams and societies. The most notorious event is the Freshers' Scavenger Hunt, a university-wide competition that requires first-years to collect a list of increasingly absurd items and photograph themselves completing various tasks, with points awarded for creativity and deducted for refusal to participate. The hunt has resulted in several incidents over the years, including the theft of a stuffed horse from the museum in 2019 and a student climbing the clock tower in 2021, but the university has never officially banned it, preferring to issue stern warnings that are universally ignored. The week concludes with the Pledging, a ceremony in the New Chapel where new students sign the university register and receive their formal student identification, a process that is brief and anticlimactic but which is treated with a gravity that seems disproportionate to its actual significance.
Graduation at Ashworth takes place in the Spencer Theatre, with the main auditorium rearranged to accommodate the graduates and their families, and follows a set of rituals that are distinct from those of most British universities. The ceremony opens with the Procession of the Mace, where the Keeper of the Seal carries the university mace – a heavy silver object topped with a horse's head – down the central aisle while the choir performs a piece written for the occasion in 1967 and never updated. Graduates wear the traditional gown and mortarboard, but with a distinctive navy and gold hood that indicates their programme of study, with business graduates wearing a gold trim, law graduates wearing a silver trim, and art history graduates wearing a white trim. The principal delivers a formal address, the graduates are called by name to receive their certificates, and the ceremony concludes with the Throwing of the Tokens, a tradition where graduates toss their wooden Freshers' Week tokens into a basin of water placed at the front of the stage, symbolising the end of their student obligations. The basin is emptied after the ceremony and the tokens are stored in the museum, where they join a collection that now numbers over ten thousand. The ceremony is followed by a reception in the dining hall, where champagne is served and families take photographs in front of the university's main entrance. A less formal tradition occurs later that evening, when graduates gather at the Wish Oak and add their own written farewells to the accumulated papers in the hollow, a practice that has no official sanction but which has been observed for so long that the university has tacitly accepted it.
Ashworth maintains a small number of secret or semi-secret rituals that are passed down through generations of students and are never officially acknowledged by the administration. The most significant of these is the Knights Night, held on the first full moon of each Lent term, which involves a gathering at the abandoned observatory where participants recite a series of pledges and perform a ceremony that has been described by those who have attended as both absurd and genuinely moving. The ritual's origins are uncertain, with competing theories attributing it to a 1920s student club, a 1950s prank, and a 1970s attempt to create a parody of the Honorable Lords' private events. The ceremony involves the passing of an actual historical helmet (stolen from the Museum the night before) around a circle of participants, each of whom contributes a statement about something they have failed at, and the event concludes with a communal toast made with a drink that changes each year according to a vote held in advance. Another secret ritual is the Key Ceremony, held at an undisclosed location on the last night of Trinity term, which involves a small group of graduating students who have been selected by their peers to receive a symbolic key that is said to unlock a cabinet in the library that contains the university's oldest records. The cabinet does exist and contains historical documents, but the key is a replica and the ceremony's significance is purely symbolic.
A small bronze statue of a horse stands at the junction of the main pathway to the equestrian centre, just outside the entrance to Block A. The statue is approximately eighteen inches high and sits on a stone plinth that has been repaired three times after students accidentally knocked it over during nighttime celebrations. Students rub the statue's nose before exams, before important matches, and before any significant personal event, and the nose has been worn smooth and bright by decades of contact. The statue was originally installed in 1925 as a memorial to a polo pony named Buster who died during a match and who belonged to a beloved student who later died in the war. The statue's origins are known to most students, but the luck associated with it has taken on a life of its own, and the stone plinth is now covered with small offerings – coins, feathers, ribbons, and once a handwritten note that was left there for three days before someone removed it. The university has never officially endorsed the statue as a luck object, but they also have never attempted to remove it or discourage the tradition, and maintenance staff have been known to leave small items near the statue as a gesture of respect.
The rivalry between Northcliff Hall and Southgate Hall has generated a collection of legends and stories that are passed down through each generation of students and embellished with each retelling. The founding legend of the rivalry concerns a disputed cricket match in 1912, where Northcliff Hall's team was accused of cheating by Southgate Hall's team, leading to a brawl that required the intervention of the university principal and resulted in a formal ban on inter-hall sports that lasted until 1935. Another legend involves a ghost that is said to haunt the corridor connecting the two halls, a figure in a white gown who appears on the anniversary of a student's death by drowning in the Severn and who is said to predict the winner of the annual rugby match by which direction she walks. The most persistent legend concerns a hidden tunnel beneath the two halls, supposedly built by students in the 1950s as a way to move between the buildings undetected, which has been searched for by every generation since but never found. The rivalry is also expressed through a series of ritualised insults, including the annual Burning of the Socks, a Northcliff Hall tradition where residents burn a pair of socks bearing Southgate Hall's colours on the first night of winter, and the Southgate Hall response, which involves hanging a Northcliff Hall shirt from the clock tower on the last day of exams.
Pranks are a regular feature of campus life, with a long history and an informal set of rules that are understood by all participants. The pranks are generally directed at individuals rather than institutions, are not intended to cause lasting damage or distress, and are expected to be accepted with good humour by the victim. The most famous prank in Ashworth's history occurred in 1987, when students from Southgate Hall painted a Northcliff Hall student's horse a bright pink using washable dye that took three days to fully remove, a prank that has been referenced in multiple iterations over the years. Another memorable prank from 2004 involved the theft of the principal's office chair, which was found three weeks later on the roof of the library with a note attached that read "We fixed the squeak." More recent pranks have included the relocation of all the chairs from the dining hall to the middle of the Saddle overnight, the placement of a plastic horse in the fountain, and a campaign to replace all the portraits in the dining hall with printed photographs of the groundskeeper's dog. The university has a policy that pranks should not be punished unless they involve vandalism or endanger safety, and the student union maintains a informal truce agreement that is renewed each year and which has been violated only twice in the last decade.