Timber 2022

I'm still recovering from a weekend of music and activities at Timber Festival on the wonderful Feanedock site in the National Forest. This is the fourth year (with a gap in 2020) that the festival has taken place here and it's a fitting setting for a celebration of woods and outdoors, as not so long ago this area was given over to open-cast mining; now through landscaping and the planting of trees, it's returning to nature. 

With a mix of woodland and open glades, it divides naturally into a series of linked but separate spaces for stages, food vendors, well-being activities, woodland crafts, and campfire discussions. 

Smoke Fairies

Despite all my scribblings in the programme, I didn't find time to everything I would have liked to do. We were there nice and early on Friday to catch Smoke Fairies kicking off the show on the Eyrie stage, and caught lots of incredible acts here and on the bigger Nightingale stage, lying back in the afternoon sun, eating dairy-free ice cream, and letting the music wash over me.

 Favourites? 

Smoke Fairies, atmospheric and haunting. 

The Rajasthan Heritage Brass Band, full of life, Bollywood rhythms, and joyous exuberance.  

Lunatraktors' modern protest songs and clog dancing.

Josienne Clarke silhouetted by the sun

 Josienne Clarke, despite her claims that all her songs seemed a bit melancholy, I loved their gentle sound

Ceitidh Mac on the
beautifully-sited Eyrie stage

In between there was Ivan Campo (an Indie folk trio, not the Spanish footballer), Kabantu, Mishra, Ceitidh Mac, and Haiku Salut, Unfortunately, Holy Moly and the Crackers due to close the festival on Sunday evening, and who I've been trying to catch for years, had to cancel at the last minute (but I might not have still been awake by then). By the way, dancing - whether ceilidh or bollywood - I left to others.

In and among this, I found time to  make wildflower seed balls with the National Memorial Arboretum; I dropped in and out (that's the beauty of an outdoor festival) of various talks and discussions, as wide ranging as Simon Armitage reading from his new book, The Owl and the Nightingale, and Steve Guy, aka The Hungry Guy, showing how to make your own vinegar. The most interesting I found were Louisa Ziane on the amount of waste in food production, and how Toast ale came into being to use up unwanted bread, and Dr Jack Matthews' Beginners Guide to Pebbles about the geology of  pebbles you might find in Charnwood Forest Geopark. 

In another wooded clearing, the Canopy, I watched Lives of Clay a story told through dance and music, mingling of the myths of Parvati and Shiva with a story of a modern Indian woman 

  

There were some slight disappointments - rain showers which found their way into the tent; Holy Moly and the Crackers couldn't perform as I've mentioned above, and Janet Ellis also had to cancel her Wilderness Tracks session; various glitches and injury plagued Timeless performance in a huge hour glass, and it never really seemed dark enough for the Gloaming Light Trail and the Unfurl Giants to be seen at their best.
 

But mainly it was a weekend of blissed out lazing in the sun.

Next year Timber will run from Friday 7th to Sunday 9th July, and Early Bird tickets are on sale now - see here 

I was asked along to Timber, and my ticket paid for, by the organisers Wild Rumpus, though I made a donation to the pay-it-forward scheme which aims to raise fund for free tickets for carers. Views are, of course, my own.