Edge of the Wild 2026
Bones and Buds: Tending Ecologies on the Threshold
Thursday 16th to Sunday 19th July, 2026
After a fallow year, Edge of the Wild is gathering again. The organising group has been honouring ghosts of gatherings past, reflecting on what needs to be composted, and treasuring the old bones – to gently midwife the new roots, sprouts and buds yet to come.
You are warmly invited to join us at this moment of transition. Together, with radical tenderness, we will co-create a temporary, more-than-human community in rural Worcestershire. As we turn towards the realities of our time – these psycho-somatic ecologies of extinction and rebirth – we recognise that this can be both beautiful and painful. In the midst of this complexity, we are choosing a culture of care.
To support this threshold moment, this year there is a renewed focus on situating ourselves on the banks of River Teme. The gathering will be structured in ways that meet more deeply with these elders, so we may listen to the orchard ancestors, the Teme, the bats, wind, glow-worms, geese, and a myriad more – our wider ecological community who have accompanied Edge of the Wild since its birth in 2012.
As in previous years, this will be a therapeutically held and decentralised space, where shared processes can unfold naturally. We will gather to be in community, to learn from and support one another, to be with the tensions and possibilities of this time, and to eat, play, and rest together. From here, we will tend to what emerges through relationship with our kith and kin.
Dates – Thursday 16th to Sunday 19th July, 2026 – we very much hope to see you there! So save the date or buy your tickets now Tickets.
You will be welcome to arrive from 2.30pm onward on Thursday to be ready for the introduction at 4.30pm and opening ceremony at 5.30 pm. The ‘community’ disperses after lunch on Sunday and participants depart between 2 and 3pm.
Please see below for more information.
Ground(ing) Groups
At the beginning of the gathering we will all form small groups to offer a support base over the three days. Each group will be associated with a particular aspect of the landscape and will meet there to nurture relationships with place and each other. The ground group is an intimate space in which to work with the theme of the gathering and any other arising needs.
Community Group
Core to this gathering is the experience of being together with other people who value listening to the nonhuman world. At Edge of the Wild, there are multiple opportunities to gather as a whole group to weave our experiences together, held by our other-than-human elders.
We also gather as a whole community group in the Social Dreaming Matrix and in Council (see below), as well as during the opening and closing ceremonies.
Patchwork
We invite offers of workshops to emerge in response to what arises at the gathering. Anyone who attends can offer a (roughly 2 hour) workshop, to be decided together at the gathering. There is usually an introductory ‘What is ecopsychology?’ session for those who would like it.
Social Dreaming Matrix
This is the sharing of dreams within the community in an often rich and powerful morning session. Dreams are received not as personal possessions but as collective wisdom, including messages from the land, for understanding the forces at play in the present moment.
Whatever has emerged in your dreaming past and present is welcome. We have found the other-than-human and more-than-human crowding into the shared dreams – animals, birds, fishes, trees, plants, insects – all generously sharing their wisdom with us.
Sitting in Council
A more formal circular space for addressing the theme and what arises during the gathering, based on turn-taking, holding space, and non-judgemental listening. We honour nonverbal contributions, the ancient tradition of the Talking Stick, and actively support ways for quieter voices to express themselves.
Play
On the banks of River Teme, there are opportunities to go wild swimming every day. There are lots of informal spaces to relax alone or hang out with friends old and new, including the fireside and the bar.
On the Friday evening, there is an open mic session around the community fire, so please bring your instruments, poems, songs and stories!
On the Saturday evening, we will be entertained by DJI DJ who are wanted by at least 3 galactic federations for crimes against sine waves, a dozen violations against the interstellar boogie code, and grand larceny. Learning to drive hovercrafts when they were just 8, DJI DJ emigrated far away from their home planet of Boogatron in order to learn deeper secrets about the nature of the Groove. Now, returning after an almost 200 year absence, they are sure to have you flying out of your seats and onto the forest floor.
Christine Cooper and Anne-Marie Summers will enchant you with Stories & Sounds from the Wild Woods. Join a raucous ceilidh in a clearing; listen for the siren song of the wind; run free with wild hares; and if you dare – meet the wild feminine power waiting at the heart of the forest. Christine (fiddle, storytelling) and Anne-Marie (bagpipe, harp, clarinet, voice) are folk musicians with decades of experience, a smattering of awards, international tours, and BBC radio play between them. They’re based in the Welsh border marches area, where they often play for European folk dance events.
Saturday night always includes spontaneous communing around the fire, making jolly and other revelry.
The history of the land
As we are orienting ourselves even more towards the land this year, we have done some research into the history of the land on and with which we will gather, which has unearthed some spectacular stories. These histories will be woven into the gathering and there is a preview here –Bransford and the river Teme.
Therapeutic process
The gathering is organised by Ecopsychology UK and is attended by a variety of interested people, including those involved in therapeutic or mental health work and outdoor educators. There will be well-being leads, facilitators, and human elders present. The gathering invites active participation from the group, and we are all encouraged to collectively take responsibility for ourselves.
Who is this for?
This is for everybody who is curious! We welcome participants from all backgrounds. Ecopsychology UK is committed to nurturing an intersectional space where everyone, including people of colour, LGBTQIA+ people, disabled and neurodivergent people, and those from working-class backgrounds, feels comfortable enough to share if they want to.
If you have specific accessibility requests please contact us (edgeofthewild2012@gmail.com) or Green & Away, who will do their best to support your participation. They can be contacted by phone 03000 110 165 or by email info@greenandaway.org.
The site and our hosts
Green & Away is a small tented outdoor festival-style site, organised around a central community fire. All of your meals are cooked by Green & Away. They provide delicious vegetarian food, and cater for vegan and gluten-free diets. There is a camping field for those bringing their own tents and vans are also welcome. For those seeking extra comfort, bell tents and yurts can be booked through the Green & Away website.. Green and Away
Tickets
Please get your tickets here – Edge of the Wild 2026
Invited Guests, Resident Artist and Resident Poet
This year we have invited two guests, an artist, and a poet to nourish and support the process of the community.
Marianne Siddons Heginworth – Beginning as a Drama therapist, with my husband Ian Siddons Heginworth we pioneered both Environmental Arts Therapy in the UK and The Circle of Trees Specialist Practitioner training which I still currently run as well as running a private practice in our Devon woodland. I’m passionate about deepening our intimacy with our inner and outer weather, letting life truly touch us, sovereignty and inter-dependence, composting and re-seeding our old strategies and growing our gifts from the root stock of our core wounding. I am ever in devotion to the unseen realms and wooing the mysterious with the poetic and creative genius that I believe is in all of us.
My work draws on the indigenous traditions of these lands re-imagined for these times, rooted in ritual theatre and emergent ceremony created with the spirits of place. I am a very ordinary, magnificent, vulnerable and powerful being just like you.
Tim Hutton – I have lived and worked on the same piece of land for the last 30 years and I feel very thankful for the opportunity
and for the questions and challenges this experience continues to raise.
In 2023, I completed the year long Circle of Trees, a deep exploration of the Wheel of the Year with Marianne Siddons Heginworth.
This work has brought me back to Art as a way of working with Nature and with other people.
Working with Moor Wild, a local community group, I am interested in finding ways back to Nature, to repair the separation;
I appreciate for many of us this return is an ongoing practice and is not always easy. Following the Wheel of the Year, and working with my
hands alongside other makers, has been helpful in this work.
It is becoming less easy to describe what I do, and I wonder if that is about aging and facing a different stage of life; as I move into that phase,
I have plenty of questions about growing older, what constitutes elderhood and how the Natural world can guide and support us through these life changes.
Tor Woven – I work intuitively in collaboration with many guides and allies, from plant kin and their dyes, to well- in- spirit Ancestors and their wisdom. Together, we honour each of Life’s initiatory thresholds, each rite of passage. Together, we weave love, protection, and medicine for the times of great transformation in ones life and of this ever changing world. I work with the ancient crafts of Spinning and Weaving and also Pottery, re-membering the sacredness of Life and Death through both clay and cloth.
Alissa Kindred – Spoken word poetry lead me to truth and helped me to recover soul and find community, in the isolation of matrescence it has helped me to arrive. Since tripping into it back in 2019, my work has been featured online, on BBC radio, in publications, theatres, festivals, open mics and events, described as powerful, fluid and deft. I perform regularly and hold workshops, circles and ceremonies in service to the mystery and magic we can find on the edge of the mundane. My practise and interest extends through written, visual and community arts, and traditional crafts such as weaving. Environmental arts therapy, sauna hosting & playback theatre are budding from the taproot of exploring the relationship between nature, art/creativity and healing, which has been present in one way or another through my life.
My roots are in rural Suffolk, where I grew up on a farm, and I’ve spent the last 20 odd years on the wild edge of the Atlantic in Cornwall. I’m still arriving. Thank you so much for having me, I’m curious to experience what unfolds in this emergent field we’ll cocreate, and honoured to be poet to it.
The 2026 team introduce themselves:
Elvy Crowe – As an artist harking from the West Country via Oxford (and some other places) I love texture and movement in bodies through music, dancing, and textiles. As a researcher intent on queering and decolonising ecology, I love what changes when all beings are perceived as animate, including the vibrating rocks and the stomata mouths of plants. I find excitement in the liminality of a threshold, such as the kind where dandelions pop through tarmac, and hope to play on these colourful, complex edges.
Leonie Guest – These days I am a Core Process psychotherapist and Wild Therapist; I facilitate groups and do very wild (lazy) gardening. But my roots were in the tarmac and bricks of Manchester, where I had a rabbit and a hedgehog that lived in the compost heap of our back garden that was the size of postage stamp. It’s been a long journey with much support and privilege.
I arrive with curiosity around the threshold between the wild and the domesticated, and all of the conditioning and trauma that needs composting on this potentially very fertile edge.
Milou Pothast – I am currently an Integrative and Wild Therapist roaming the hedgerows in London. My life started out in the woods of Salland in the Netherlands and then took me to an island in the north – serving pancakes under a lighthouse and sailing the seas on a small catamaran. It’s been a winding and liminal journey since then to find my way back to the trees, wind and sea. I am preoccupied with how we can meet our time of increasing chaos and destruction with a real passion for life. I arrive at this threshold moment welcoming in the ghosts at Edge of the Wild and a wanting to sing with river.
Gerard Davies – I’ve travelled many paths, as storyteller, therapeutic coach, facilitator, quietly listening to Land, River and more‑than‑human worlds. My roots frequent systems and organisations, yet I notice I’m drawn to spaces where structure softens and life can emerge. Since childhood, my Self and attention have settled around thresholds where inner and outer landscapes meet, where grief and possibility sit side by side. Here, “sustainability” feels less like task, more like embodied remembering: I shift from consumer of nature to participant within; belonging in more reciprocal ways. I journey to Edge of the Wild as part of a caring collective enquiry, drawn to eddies where we might catch nature quietly offering us back our Selves; reflecting a world anew. I come to listen, learn, and help hold space where trust and vulnerability allow something honest, perhaps unexpected, to unfold in this storied place, the Fold.
Patricia Grey – I’m an integrative, embodied-relational and wild psychotherapist spending my time between London and East Sussex, exploring the spaces between domesticity and wildness. My journey began far from the green spaces I’ve always craved; growing up in the concrete-heavy East End of London, with Irish roots, I developed a lifelong yearning for the outdoors. My first true foray into wildness was a spontaneous decision to sit on the garden shed during a storm and wash my hair while everyone else hid indoors. I’ve always loved the rain!
I aim to bring that same spirit to my work, embracing the energy of bees, trees, and sea to help others find grounding. I’m coming to the Edge of the Wild with a deep desire to sing, dance, and connect—not just with fellow humans, but with our other-than-human and more-than-human allies.
Robbie Breadon – I am a psychotherapist, ecotherapist, nature-based groups facilitator and poet. Formerly director of Common Ground N.I., I spent over a decade helping steward a small rewilding farm in Northern Ireland as a place for ecotherapy, community gatherings and relationship with land. I have been involved with the Ecopsychology community and Edge of the Wild since 2012 and have held the role of MC for the fireside sharing at many gatherings. I’m is a dreamer, dancer, poet and father, with a lifelong love of the outdoors expressed through surfing, scuba diving, hill walking, conservation work and coastal wandering. My path has taken me to explore diverse ways of understanding what it means to be human, including a PhD in Molecular Microbiology, Traditional Five Element Acupuncture, Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy, and Ecopsychology. I come to Edge of the Wild 2026 with a yearning to form community that includes and acknowledges the other than human beings.
