Blending songs with stories and folklore, this special concert celebrates our relationship with the trees.

With the roots in the ground and the branches stretching to the skies, trees have provided poetic and spiritual inspiration, connecting heaven to earth and reminders of deep time. Singer-songwriter and folk archivist Sam Lee, together with writer Jon Drori, will lead us through musical forests and orchards, spinning stories and providing a sonically beautiful celebration.

The JW3 music programme has been kindly sponsored by The Dorset Foundation in memory of Harry Weinrebe.

The Oxford Real Farming Conference has developed over the last twelve years to become the unofficial gathering of the real food and farming movement in the UK. Working with partners, the conference brings together farmers, growers, activists, policy-makers, researchers and all those who support agroecology, including organic and regenerative agriculture and indigenous systems.

Folk Singer, song collector & presenter Sam Lee has spent the last 15 years working with some of the most exciting British and international folk artists and industry professionals re-galvanizing the London and UK folk scene through his live events challenging the ecosystem of the music scene. Director of The Nest Collective & The Song Collectors Sam is also an award-winning, Mercury Music Prize-nominated musician himself. Sam's been instrumental as one of the new wave of activists shaping the landscape of the folk world and roots music in the UK and connecting music with environmental and conservation awareness.

Gates open at 6.00. Bring a picnic.

Please arrive by 6.30pm for a walk to the woods and a 7.00pm start.

A 4-day gathering to inspire authentic connection and regeneration for people and planet. Our World is changing and we find ourselves in a time that holds both great peril and great promise.

Now more than ever is the time to seek new narratives, connections, skills and understanding to rekindle the fabric of community, redefine culture, celebrate the beauty and wonder of life and help us to restore our home, this sacred Earth.

Medicine invites you to come together to share the power of music and ceremony, the coherence and insights of ancestral wisdom, alongside solutions of modern technology and culture; the nourishment of food; the joy of laughter and celebration; and the inspiration of visionary thought – asking a simple question: How can we be the Medicine?

A special musical performance by Sam as part of a two-day retreat that will use talks, film, storytelling, nature connection practices, silent and walking meditation to find ground in this new reality, gain deeper kinship with the living world, celebrate the abundance of summer, and look to the emerging connections between ecology, culture, and spirituality.

An annual ten-day event which brings together some of the biggest names in publishing. Award-winning authors of fiction and non-fiction join poets, spoken word artists and new voices to delve into a range of topics including travel and adventure, food and drink, lifestyle, history, art and religion. Still leading the way in celebrating the written and spoken word, the world’s first literature festival will Read the World, presenting the best new voices in fiction and poetry alongside literary greats and high-profile speakers.

Sam will be discussing his book 'The Nightingale. Notes on a Songbird' with Poet Laureate Simon Armitage.

Further details soon.

The Oxford Real Farming Conference has developed over the last eleven years to become the unofficial gathering of the real food and farming movement in the UK. Working with partners, the conference brings together farmers, growers, activists, policy-makers, researchers and all those who support agroecology, including organic and regenerative agriculture and indigenous systems.

This year ORFC In the Field will also be a chance to celebrate. We will be joined by singer, folk song interpreter and passionate conservationist, Sam Lee, and we shall serve you great food.

As long as there have been people on this land there has been song, and as long as we dwell upon this land a timeless, uniquely human melody will sound from the confluence of culture and contour.

But what is that sound? From where did those lines of song and story emerge? In what language, to what tune, under what belief and through what gesture? What if there was an ancient indigenous Albion ‘dreamtime’ and what hope have we now in reclaiming any fragments of those tune-trails? Why should we even bother?

In old Ireland they say that we get ‘wise by asking questions’. So to access and activate ‘what lies beneath’, which might be our own deeper wisdom, a trail humming with questions may be just the place to start.

Questions such as these:

If below our feet there may be the footprints of the past, tracks sown by song and the passage of our ancestors, how do we, through recollection, reverie and recitation, invoke and map them and turn them into treasure for our times?
Have we the knowing, imagination and the trust in these invisible pathways to tune into those ancient frequencies?
What impact would divining them have upon our navigation of our collective and individual journeys through today’s shifting landscapes?

Impossible questions demand implausible action and this invitation is to step beyond the rational, evidential and quantifiable into a place of soft meditation with our homeland and forge new paths into the earth and into ourselves.

Chris Salisbury and Sam Lee met one another while both in pursuit of old Devon folk song. Their winding paths even unexpectedly converged in the Kalahari desert last year where they were humbled by some of the oldest (human) songs on planet Earth, sung by the indigenous Ju/‘Hoansi San Bushman people.

Their fascination in these timeless gems passed down through the Oral Tradition came from a similar dedication to nature connection practise and a curiosity in how our ancestors expressed their love of the land through song and story. Over the years these questions have tickled at both their chins of how folk songs and composed, even improvised songs, devotional in their appreciation of our natural world, can work to connect us deeper into the land and our senses. Likewise if nature connection skills and practices can be enhanced through songful expression and open up new patterns in our awareness and help orientate our inner compass.

This 5 days of playful, embodied experimentation and enquiry will afford us the sacred space to recalibrate how we engage with the land and converse with our brother/sister nations of plants, trees and beings. Going beyond mere naming and species identification we will surf the wood-wide-web, ‘truffle hunting’ for ‘songlines’ that may still pulse below us in the organic and cultural substrate of Dartmoor National Park.

You don’t need to be a ‘singer’, but we welcome those with big ears and big hearts for the deep listening and feeling engendered in our interactions with the land. If you have an artistic practice that’s a bonus, but if you harbour aspirations to write, sing, dance or just deepen your intimacy with the natural world, then you will be greeted with joy, by us and all the ‘Others’ who are hungry to hear your true name….

Further details to be announced. Register your interest at info@wildwise.co.uk