Last weekend, I finally got round to checking out my (fairly) local community woodland. There was some kind of annual festival on – you know, some sad little theme-park effort, with a few tacky craft stalls...
How wrong can a girl be? Some of the craft stalls were tacky, but many were superb, and most were convincingly woody – from the out and out bushcraft, thru an impressive range of atavistic green woodworking stuff, to top-notch native-hardwood furniture making. (The bushcraft guy, appropriately, didn’t have a website. But he had sold some bark containers to someone from the furniture makers’ stall. Good craft is good craft, whatever the genre.)
The public areas were cunningly carved out of mature conifer plantation, with the trees thinned out enough to allow light through for grass to grow for people to walk on, and, at the unmown edges, for tangles of undergrowth to emerge, limiting people’s wandering.
Working woodland works well as a venue: both main stage and bagpipes alike became just a vague siren call from the other side of a block. There were many entertainments. I ignored most of them, of course, because I enjoy being serious. Samba band, chainsaw carving demonstration, mountain biking display, acrobats, yadda yadda, whatever. I had information to hoover up: yum. In a brief, happy afternoon I found leads on half a dozen things I’d been wanting to find. And all within the comforting green of forest. But after I’d checked out names and faces from other woody events, fallen into intense discussion with a man who sometimes kills squirrels for a living, bought a clay plaque from another who lit up about his ancient hedgerow research, and gathered up a small mountain of contact details and leaflets, I leaned against a Scots pine tree and settled down to the serious business of listening to some really fine bluegrass music.*
For a few brief hours, I was in heaven.
There was room for improvement, of course. Pissing in a chemical loo in the middle of acres of woodland seems a little perverse, and the burger van really should have been selling venison burgers (and squirrel kebabs), garnished with some of the abundant wood sorrel, with forest mushrooms as the vegetarian option… but overall, the event was sheer bliss. I have seen the future of partying, and there’s room for a really quite surprising number of trees in it.
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* Please insert your preferred taste in music here, and don’t be put off. Banjos aren’t, as far as I know, an essential part of forest festivals. I think the gods laid that bit on just for me.
How wrong can a girl be? Some of the craft stalls were tacky, but many were superb, and most were convincingly woody – from the out and out bushcraft, thru an impressive range of atavistic green woodworking stuff, to top-notch native-hardwood furniture making. (The bushcraft guy, appropriately, didn’t have a website. But he had sold some bark containers to someone from the furniture makers’ stall. Good craft is good craft, whatever the genre.)
The public areas were cunningly carved out of mature conifer plantation, with the trees thinned out enough to allow light through for grass to grow for people to walk on, and, at the unmown edges, for tangles of undergrowth to emerge, limiting people’s wandering.
Working woodland works well as a venue: both main stage and bagpipes alike became just a vague siren call from the other side of a block. There were many entertainments. I ignored most of them, of course, because I enjoy being serious. Samba band, chainsaw carving demonstration, mountain biking display, acrobats, yadda yadda, whatever. I had information to hoover up: yum. In a brief, happy afternoon I found leads on half a dozen things I’d been wanting to find. And all within the comforting green of forest. But after I’d checked out names and faces from other woody events, fallen into intense discussion with a man who sometimes kills squirrels for a living, bought a clay plaque from another who lit up about his ancient hedgerow research, and gathered up a small mountain of contact details and leaflets, I leaned against a Scots pine tree and settled down to the serious business of listening to some really fine bluegrass music.*
For a few brief hours, I was in heaven.
There was room for improvement, of course. Pissing in a chemical loo in the middle of acres of woodland seems a little perverse, and the burger van really should have been selling venison burgers (and squirrel kebabs), garnished with some of the abundant wood sorrel, with forest mushrooms as the vegetarian option… but overall, the event was sheer bliss. I have seen the future of partying, and there’s room for a really quite surprising number of trees in it.
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* Please insert your preferred taste in music here, and don’t be put off. Banjos aren’t, as far as I know, an essential part of forest festivals. I think the gods laid that bit on just for me.
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