Save the date!

Please don’t miss the chance to join us again and celebrate the rich and varied landscapes of North Norfolk and the British Isles in a weekend festival of walks and talks, readings and discussions, an exhibition and field trips

from

2 – 4 October 2026

at Wells Maltings, Wells-next-the-sea

While we put together the programme for next year’s festival, please keep an eye out for new releases as we publish videos of last year’s talks on our YouTube channel.

Here’s a reminder of what happened in 2025:

• we welcomed Alan Hollinghurst – knighted at the start of the year for services to literature. Alan was interviewed by John Mullan about his latest novel, Our Evenings and those vivid settings that take us into every corner of life and recent history.

• in a groundbreaking interview, Richard Mabey talked to Patrick Barkham about Mabey’s latest work, his garden in South Norfolk and the way ahead for people and the natural world. Richard is the grandfather of nature writing who reset our relationship with the environment through over 30 books in fifty years from Food for Free to Flora Britannica to Nature Cure.

• Charles Clover first brought our attention to the state of the sea after decades of overfishing and ran a global charity to turn this tide. Charles spoke to Mark Cocker about what has been happening in our seas and what can be done now.

• author Julia Blackburn spoke to Patrick Galbraith about her award-winning creative non-fiction books, her approach to landscape, nature, time and why she mixed her husband’s ashes with yogurt.

• fresh from winning the Laurel prize for nature and landscape – sponsored by the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage – poet Katrina Porteous talked with author Patrick Galbraith about places that make us. Patrick’s book Uncommon Ground and Katrina’s collection Rhizodont and forty years of work before that engaged deeply with the people whose lives and identities are tied up with our landscapes and coastal waters.

• poets Matthew Hollis and Bernard O’Donoghue went back in time with readings from their translations of classics of Anglo-Saxon poetry to explore the ways in which our forebears and predecessors interacted with landscape, the sea and wildlife.

• Our exhibition: Vanishing Species, Sugar-Beet Moons and Landscapes of London and Norfolk featured work by Tor Falcon, Beatrice Forshall and Rosie Reeve.

• Jake Fiennes, Nick Trend, Charles Rangeley-Wilson, John Ebbage and Fraser Bradbury led guided walks across a salt marsh at low tide and a rewilding project of 2,000 acres and explored the visionary design of Holkham’s park inspired by Italian paintings. Nick Groom skippered a boat trip down the channel from Wells Harbour.

• Our schools’ programme saw authors Natasha Hastings and Iona Rangeley talking to local schoolchildren about how to write creatively and about their own books – Cecily Sawyer: How to be a Spy and The Miraculous Sweetmakers: The Frost Fair. Each child was given a copy of the book they had hard about. Schools enjoyed creative workshops and riverfly taster sessions and took part in our annual schools’ poetry competition – judged by Alan Hollinghurst.

Please explore our other pages to find out more…

Many thanks to our generous sponsors and partners who put their faith in the festival. Without them the weekend would not have been possible: