Wild Beltane Fayre – A vision of a wild village
May Day weekend 2027

Wild Beltane Fayre is an attempt to create a completely different kind of festival.

In a world where so much of our lives is increasingly dominated by screens and technology, where we spend so much time looking at things rather than actually doing them, we want to create something that feels more like a temporary wild village: a place where, for a few days, we can come together and remember the simple pleasure of working with our hands, being outside, making things, sharing food, learning songs and stories, and creating meaningful expressions of community, creativity and ceremony together.

Rather than building a festival around lots of stages, stalls, cafés and things to consume, we want to make a place where everyone who comes can, in some way, become part of what is happening.

At the centre of the village we imagine one great hall, something like an old feasting hall, with long tables where we can all sit and eat together. There will be fires, great shared meals, storytellers, musicians, songs and conversations, and hopefully that wonderful feeling that comes when you sit down to eat with people you don’t yet know and, by the end of the meal, something has changed.

We want food to be part of the gathering itself rather than simply another thing that you queue up and buy.

The music will follow the same spirit. We want to keep the whole gathering as unplugged and off-grid as we possibly can, with real musicians playing real instruments, without huge sound systems or electronic stages.

We will invite some of the best folk musicians, traditional musicians and singers we know, but the intention isn’t simply that they perform and everybody else watches. We want music to move through the village, around the fires and into the feasting hall. We want people to learn songs together, to sing together, to dance and to experience music again as something that belongs to all of us rather than something delivered from a stage.

A huge part of the gathering will be about learning practical skills and rediscovering the pleasure of making things with our own hands.

There will be weaving and spinning, carving and green woodworking, flint knapping, basket making, working with clay, fire making, foraging, herbs and wild plants, natural dyes, and all sorts of ways of working directly with wood, wool, earth, fire and water.

We don’t want these simply to be workshops that you watch for an hour and then wander away from. We want people to become involved, to learn from people who have spent their lives developing these skills and, wherever possible, to contribute what they make to the life of the village and to the ceremonies that unfold over the weekend.

Beltane itself is important.

This isn’t simply a convenient name for a May Bank Holiday festival. Beltane is one of the great turning points of the year, when winter has passed, the land is opening again and everything is pushing back towards life.

We want to explore what it might mean to celebrate that together now, not by trying to recreate some imagined version of the past, but by making ceremonies that have meaning for the people who are actually there.

We will work together to create beautiful things from natural materials, make offerings to the land, light fires, tell stories, sing, dance and remember our connection to the people who came before us and those who will come after us.

And perhaps underneath all of this is something very simple.

We would like to find out what happens when, for just a few days, we put the screens away and give our attention back to each other and to the world immediately around us.

When we sit beside a fire rather than staring at a phone. When we make something with our hands, learn the name of a plant, listen to someone tell a story, share a meal with people we’ve never met before, learn a song and then sing it together.

Not because technology is bad, or because we want to pretend we can return to some lost golden age, but because there are parts of being human that no technology can replace.

So Wild Beltane is not really about coming away for a weekend to be entertained or simply to have a jolly, although we certainly hope there will be plenty of laughter, dancing, feasting and celebration.

It is about creating a place where we can reconnect with some of the things that really matter in life: friendship, community, creativity, the land, the elements, our ancestors, our children, the skills carried in our hands and the extraordinary experience of actually being together.

For a few days, we want to make a village together and see what becomes possible.