Our programme
Booking information
Tickets are available via TicketSource.
If you prefer, you can book in person at Hunting Raven Bookshop, Cheap Street, Frome.
There are no booking fees.
Our main venue is RISE, Whittox Lane, Frome BA11 3BY, right in the heart of the town. What3words: rise.select.drum.
In the event of cancellation, we will refund tickets. Otherwise, we operate a no return/refund policy.
If you have tickets you can’t use, please consider handing them in at the bookstall
at RISE, where they can be resold to benefit a local charity.
Both the venue and Rye Bakery café are wheelchair accessible.
All venues have unreserved seating.
Please do not use audio or video recording
equipment during events, nor cameras and
mobile phones.
There is an FAQs page here. If you
have any unanswered queries, please
contact considerthewondrous@gmail.com.
There will be a book signing at the
bookshop in Rye Bakery café after each talk.
Look who's coming
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SATURDAY 19th SEPTEMBER
EVENT 1
10am £15
HERITAGE TREE WALK led by JULIAN HIGHT
A chance to meet some of Frome’s most majestic trees, and hear about their history, legacy and lore from the arboreal expert Julian Hight, author of many books including the beautiful new The Ancient Tree Explorer.
This will be an easy walk, lasting about 90mins. It will start at the Cheese and Grain BA11 1BE. Children are welcome if accompanied by a responsible adult. Places are limited so please book early.
EVENT 2
10.30am £10
Gareth Howell-Jones
& Jay Griffiths
Our Place in the Living World
Consider the Wondrous opens with Director Gareth Howell-Jones explaining how the festival came about, why it’s in Frome, what it is for and what we hope it can begin to achieve. He’ll talk too about the simple but radical way of looking squarely at nature that underpins his books Do Not Call the Tortoise and Your Lowly Hedgehog Knows.
Jay Griffiths has won many awards and written on a variety of subjects with guts and grace and passion. In How Animals Heal Us, she draws on deep research to show how animals not only help our physical and mental health but have influenced our society and carry a deep spiritual charge. The book is teeming with eye-opening stories – about the life-saving justice of dogs and lions; about the ethics of wolves; about fieldfares who demonstrate the power of community in the most unexpected way!
EVENT 3
12 noon £12
JC NIALA & AMANDA TUKE talk to Stephen Moss
Wildlife in the towns and cities
Did you know there are seahorses living wild in the Thames? Nature isn’t just about the countryside and cities aren’t just for people. In their thoughtful, heart-felt and often very funny books, anthropologist JC Niala and ‘Urban Naturalist’ Amanda Tuke show how the non-human world co-exists with us, from the tiniest plants and lichen we tread underfoot to the lions and rhinos in JC’s hometown Nairobi.
JC (The New Eden) tells the charged history of urban nature from the Diggers to community gardening in the wake of Grenfell, from the canalization of rivers to the cows that shaped London. Amanda (Wild Pavements) brings her infectious delight to toad-patrolling, ‘vismigging’ and finds fish making their homes in shopping-trolleys. Both meet people making real changes at a local level, but urban light, noise and sewage pollution remain a threat to most species.
“As cities grow, the danger is not only ecological but emotional ... If we want a future that is not only liveable but meaningful, we must learn to care differently. That begins by paying attention – to the cracks in the pavements, the stories in trees, the silence that follows loss.” (JC Niala)
Amanda is leading a pavement plant walk around Frome this afternoon (Event 5)
EVENT 4
1.30pm £12
HORATIO CLARE talks to JULIA SAMUEL
Nature and our minds
Horatio has always been a lover and close observer of nature. In 2018 he had a mental breakdown; he was fully, psychotically delusional. He wrote about that experience with great bravery in Heavy Light, and a wonderfully generous and informative guide to mental health and the paths to recovery in Your Journey Your Way. Mental health is infinitely complex, and ‘nature-loving’ is no panacea, but when, in the midst of fantasy and derangement, Horatio encountered a goshawk and stared into its golden eye, for a moment all delusions fell away before the utterness of the wild world. Nature can be deeply restorative.
He writes, “My parents were moved and soothed by nature in the same way, and I learned this from them. It was always there for us, and we were united in those moments, free from pain and worry. That is what nature has always done for me.”
Julia Samuel is a psychotherapist and author.
EVENT 5
2.30pm £15
PAVEMENT PLANT PROWL led by AMANDA TUKE
Join urban naturalist and Wild Pavements author Amanda Tuke for a pavement plant prowl and hear some of the fascinating stories behind the urban plants we find. What will she discover in the famous leat running down Cheap St? What other marvels do we ignore every day?
The walk will begin at our main venue RISE and last 75-90mins. Places are limited so please book early.
EVENT 6
3pm £12
ROSA VASQUEZ ESPINOZA talks to Nicola Cutcher
The Secrets of the Amazon
Rosa grew up in Peru with the rainforest as her back garden, learning its lessons from her grandmother, a native healer in natural medicine. Now as a biologist and conservationist, she re-explores the Amazon with a unique blend of scientific enquiry and ancient insight.
In her book The Spirit of the Rainforest, we meet pink dolphins, killer caterpillars, stingless bees, fish the size of a VW Beetle and a river whose waters flow at boiling point.
Rosa takes ayahuasca with the shamans and travels with the Ashaninka community who practise kametsu asaiki ‘living beautifully’ – ‘honouring the invisible spiritual bond we have with the natural world’
She writes, ‘The Amazon brings us back to our roots: to the simple yet profound truth that we are an extension of nature and beauty. It teaches us strength and resilience in the face of change. It shows us that generosity overpowers unfairness.”
Nicola Cutcher is an investigative journalist and campaigner against river pollution.
EVENT 7
4.30pm £12
ELOISE KANE talks to HORATIO CLARE
When were we wild?
In Wilderlands, the archaeologist Eloise Kane takes us on a fascinating and unfamiliar tour through 12,000 years of our history. When the glaciers finally retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, our ancestors crossed the land-bridge from the continent and reinhabited these islands. There have been humans here ever since, working the land, taking from it what they needed (and often taking more). So, when was Britain last truly wild?
Archaeology has made amazing advances in recent decades, changing our view of the past. Perhaps when we realise that humans have always been a part of this landscape, we can see our own problems in a new light. She shows how plants and animals, like us, manipulate their environments. “In this way of thinking, it is easier to envisage humans as part of the world, as one node in a much vaster set of relationships, rather than the be-all and end-all of existence.”
EVENT 8
6pm £12
JON GOWER & STEPHEN MOSS in conversation
Bird talk
An unmissable conversation between two great bird enthusiasts.
Jon Gower has loved birds since one of his collier grandfather’s canaries hatched in the palm of his hand. In Birdland, he travels Britain from Portland Bill to the Hebrides in search of kittiwakes, bustards and turtle doves as well as a remarkable cast of characters – poets, soldiers, ‘The Goose Whisperer’ – who observe, conserve and marvel at them.
Stephen Moss is a naturalist, broadcaster and author of many books including the acclaimed series of bird biographies which will hatch a new addition The Puffin this October. He has written an introduction to the classic books written in the 1950s by a remarkable musician and bird-woman Len Howard, now republished in a single volume as Bird Life. He is President of the Somerset Wildlife Trust.
Both authors, in Jon’s words, ‘want to tell people about birds in the hope that it kindles the light of care.’
EVENT 9
7.45pm £25 (inc £3 donation to Friends of the River Frome)
DAVID OAKES, IAIN BALLAMY & ELLIOT GALVIN
We Are Nature
A gala evening of words and music inspired by the natural world.
End the day with flowing jazz, beauty, poignancy and rapture. From earliest times, human art and music has celebrated and sought to understand the mysterious world around us. We’re thrilled to have such a stellar line-up for this gala where human creativity reflects back the creativity of nature.
Iain Ballamy is an internationally feted composer and saxophonist. His latest album Riversphere blurs genre divisions and boundaries between composition and improv. Recently he’s been working with the multi-instrumentalist Elliot Galvin on a new project Instant Nature.
David Oakes is a leading actor familiar to us all from stage and screen, but he’s also an ecologist and producer of the natural history podcast Tree’s a Crowd.
This special evening will be hosted by actor, bookseller and festival co-director Tina Gaisford-Waller.
Sponsored by Brook Street Pottery. brookstreetpottery.co.uk
SUNDAY 20th SEPTEMBER
EVENT 10
10am £15
Guided Nature Walk led by Mark Cocker
Mark is one of the UK’s leading naturalists, author of many award-winning books.
His newest title The Nature of Seeing (see event 14) is all about the way we look at our surroundings, so this is a wonderful opportunity to accompany him as he explores Rodden Meadow by the river near the centre of town.
This will be an easy walk, lasting about 90 minutes. It will start at the Cheese & Grain BA11 1BE. Children are welcome if accompanied by a responsible adult. Places are limited so please book early.
EVENT 11
10am FAMILY EVENT 7+ years £10 adults; children under 16 £7
DARA MCANULTY talks to MICHAEL MALAY
Wild Child
“Do you yearn to climb oak trees, to get a bird’s eye view of the world, to feel the wind of leaves? Can I show you the magic of nature? Let me take you on a journey. A wild wandering. A fascinating world awaits.”
Dara is passionate about inspiring children with the excitement that he feels for the natural world. His series of Wild Child books combine amazing facts with a sense of the poetry of the wild, beautifully illustrated by Barry Falls. He never talks down to children but feeds their natural curiosity with wonders like bioluminescence and bird migration, and gives practical advice on making moth traps, terraria and bird feeders.
Did you know that baby swifts do press-ups? That a fox can hear a beetle move thirty metres away? There’s so much to discover all around us!
Michael Malay is author of the Wainwright Prise-winning Late Light.
EVENT 12
11.30am £12
CAL FLYN talks to CHARLES FOSTER
The Savage Landscape
In The Savage Landscape Cal Flyn goes in search of wildness “because I wanted to live my life more intensely ... tap into a rawer, more authentic, more capable, part of myself.” She meets gorillas in Uganda, blue sheep in Nepal, and writes luminously of the terror and fascination of the new world created in front of her eyes by a volcanic eruption in Iceland. But she travels into thought and ideas as well as landscape, exploring the historical and political context of what she sees. Everywhere she encounters the contradictions of wildness on a crowded planet – the clutter of research bases in the pure whiteness of Antarctica, a ‘Welcome’ sign in an officially designated ‘wilderness’, the shocking but commonplace eviction of people from their ancestral lands in the name of nature conservation. Nonetheless, again and again there is astonishment. “Within each landscape one might hit a bedrock of pure feeling ... This is freedom. This is awe. This is horrified delight.”
Sponsored by Sherlock & Pages. sherlockandpages.com
EVENT 13
1pm £12
MICHAEL MALAY, ANITA ROY, JULIAN HIGHT and guests
A Library of Wonder
Nature-writing has boomed in the last twenty years. Books by two of our authors, Cal Flyn and Mark Cocker, recently appeared on The Sunday Times list of the most important non-fiction titles this century.
The best books continue to inspire new generations with hope and with the love that great naturalists, storytellers and artists show for the living world. So, we want to build a Library of Wonder, a booklist of the very best nature-related writing to guide new readers and embolden us all to know that there are truer, more positive and more fascinating things in the world than the stories the media tell. Our expert panel will make their personal recommendations:
Which nature-related books mean most to you? Which have opened your eyes and your minds? Which must you re-read and buy as gifts for your friends? Come along to offer your suggestions, and let’s share our knowledge and wonder.
EVENT 14
2.30pm £12
CHARLES FOSTER & MARK COCKER in conversation with Nicola Cutcher
Seeing the world afresh
We’re privileged to host this conversation between two of the most generous-minded thinkers concerned with the natural world.
Mark Cocker is one of our leading naturalists. He leads courses in nature watching and writing and will be leading a moth identification walk here (Event 10). His new book The Nature of Seeing encourages us to reclaim our inner gift for wonder and to see the living world in all its infinite detail and mystery.
Charles Foster is a qualified vet, barrister and Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. In The Edges of the World, he shows how in both nature and our culture, creativity, change, freshness come from the edges of things, not the complacent, self-regarding centre. It’s the perfect book for a creative and ‘different’ town like Frome!
To give the authors time to explore their ideas, this event will be 90mins long.
EVENT. 15
4.30pm £12
JOSEPH JEBELLI talks to ANITA ROY
The Brain at Rest
We’re constantly badgered to do more, to aim higher, to make the most of our time. Our phones and social media which pose as a break from work only keep our minds over-stimulated and anxious.
In The Brain at Rest, he explains why stress is so damaging and introduces us to the brain’s ‘default network’, the circuitry that helps us daydream, reflect and imagine. “Activating the default network can enhance your intelligence, creativity, social empathy and long-term productivity. It can improve your health and help stave off neurological disease.”. He shares tips on reorganising your life to prioritise sleep, finding silence, walking and spending time in nature. Rest is not a lazy alternative to work, but an essential part of it.
Anita Roy is a writer, editor, environmentalist and regular contributor to The Guardian Country Diary.
EVENT 16
6pm £12
HARRIET RIX talks to JULIAN HIGHT
The Genius of Trees
Our hope is that Consider the Wondrous can help us to rethink our place on the planet, as one remarkable species among so many others. So, it’s fitting that our final event this year should show something as commonplace as trees in a radically different light.
It’s easy to think of trees as noble, beautiful but ultimately passive presences in the landscape. Harriet Rix’s extraordinary book The Genius of Trees tells a different story. Trees have agency, modifying and working with the animals, plants and fungi around them: they manipulate the clouds to produce the climate they like, they shiver rock into fertile soil, they change the very atmosphere.
“This is a story of how tree-ish trees are, and how ... they have woven the world into a place of great beauty and extraordinary variety,” writes Harriet.
Julian Hight is a tree-expert (and leads a walk around Frome Event 1) His new book The Ancient Tree Explorer is a fascinating and sumptuous guide to the most magnificent trees in Britain.
Extra event, st john's church
5pm free
'Come and Sing' Choral Evensong
We're delighted and moved that the parish church in the centre of town is allying with us in this service of words and music reflecting on the theme 'Consider the Wondrous'.
Experienced singers who would like to add their voices to those of St John's Occasional Choir are invited to join rehearsal at 3.30pm.