Thank you for the music
We have had a wonderful year welcoming lots of you to our tours, talks and Gathering events, with some very special moments and lovely comments from our wonderful visitors.
Highlights include Mercury award-nominated Sam Lee, who delighted us by singing around a campfire as the sun set over the Hill. A special thank you must go to Ruth Dillon for organising another wonderful Gathering event.
As we look forward to 2024, we won’t be running a large Gathering festival event like the brilliant day we had in September 2022. We are currently working hard to improve our Guided Tours, and developing a brand new campsite too. We will continue to celebrate nature through art and culture, such as with artists in residence, sharing our friends’ talks and events, and other one-off projects that are in the pipeline too.
We hope you have been inspired as much as we have and look forward to seeing you again soon.
The first Gathering festival
The first Gathering was held at Wild Ken Hill on Saturday 17th September 2022. Writers, authors, speakers, and creatives enthralled, entertained and inspired a 600- strong audience about the natural world through vibrant discussion, Q&A, readings, workshops, and performances. In parallel, we meditated, immersed ourselves in Gong Baths, and ventured out into the surrounding landscape on guided tours.
Coverage of Gathering
Gathering didn’t just sit in a vacuum. The subjects discussed and presented are some of the greatest issues of the present day. Testament to the importance of the discussion at Gathering, during the brilliant opening session on Nature Recovery, the Guardian’s Helena Horton covered a key exchange on emerging government policy between chair and speaker Tony Juniper and audience member Mark Tufnell, President of the Country Land and Business Association.
See what they said
Our review of the first Gathering
At Wild Ken Hill, we’re still digesting the first Gathering, and thinking through how we can capture its spirit to curate experiences in this landscape that give people a deeper connection with the natural world. In this blog we share our experience of Gathering.
Read our review