Beefstock: Things are getting smokey

I have already told you about Under the Nut Tree, my current answer to the question “where shall we go for dinner?” regardless of whether anybody asking lives remotely near Herefordshire.

If you missed that particular love letter: it’s a supper club hidden down a lane on the Kentchurch Estate, where Simon and his family cook dinner over an enormous hand-forged live-fire grill beneath an old hazel tree. I left smelling faintly of woodsmoke, extremely well fed and immediately plotting my return with as many friends as I could reasonably fit around one table.

So naturally my eye was caught by Beefstock, where Simon is joining an entire field full of people equally enthusiastic about cooking things over fire.

The Beefy Boys and Nozstock are taking over the old Nozstock site outside Bromyard this weekend for two days dedicated to BBQ, street food, music and the increasingly serious business of British outdoor cooking. Gates open at 11am and, pleasingly, the whole thing is happening on a working Herefordshire farm.

There is a full BBQ HQ demonstration stage, and the line-up reads like somebody has assembled the Avengers of people who own very large tongs.

Genevieve Taylor runs Bristol Fire School and has written fourteen cookbooks, including books devoted to vegetables, meat, fish and pretty much everything else you can put above a flame. Birmingham’s Andy Low n Slow brings his Texan-BBQ-meets-Mexican approach. Sam and Shauna of Hang Fire BBQ are coming too, having helped drag American-style BBQ into the Welsh food scene after travelling through the southern US learning the craft. Then there’s The Lagom Chef, DJ BBQ, McBagley BBQ, The Beefy Boys’ own Murf and, importantly for those of us already converted, Simon from Under the Nut Tree.

You can also skip all educational intentions and simply eat.

The Beefy Boys Burger Truck, Under the Nut Tree, Andy Low n Slow, Taco Town, Bao to the Broth, Feast Pembrokeshire, Gurt Wings and Jerk Bay are among the traders, followed by ice cream, doughnuts and cake for anyone still displaying heroic levels of commitment.

And then Beefstock gets unexpectedly serious.

On Sunday, pitmasters will compete in a BBQ championship that is an official qualifier for the BBQ World Cup in Las Vegas. They’ll be judged on appearance, taste, texture and creativity, with the winner getting the chance to head to America and compete for a prize pot of $1 million. Which is quite a trajectory from standing in a Herefordshire field discussing brisket.

Meanwhile, there is live music spread across the site, from klezmer and Irish folk duo Razzomo to blues, funk, psychedelia, jazz, local singer-songwriters and a DJ shed that appears determined to keep everybody moving after dark. Children get crafts and activities too, under-12s go free, and parking is included.

I'll meet you at the chilli-eating competition.

Saturday 22 + Sunday 23 August | Nozstock, Bromyard | gates 11am | tickets from £16 | under-12s free

​More info + book​

Bring a picnic. The pirates are coming.

There was probably no chance of me growing into a person who quietly attended things and went home.

I come from a family with a suspicious inability to leave a stage or musical instrument alone. My grandad performed Shakespeare. My grandpa was a gloriously eccentric character who busked with his harmonica and once appeared in Three Little Maids from The Mikado. I spent years doing pantos with my dad and, these days, we’ve graduated to frequenting ukulele clubs together. I played and sang folk with my Nannan, and my mum plays a mean violin if sufficiently cornered.

So the discovery that The Pirates of Penzance is being performed outdoors at Abergavenny Castle this Sunday has activated something ancestral.

Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operetta first appeared in 1879 and is basically two hours of pirates, romance, legal technicalities and people taking completely ridiculous situations extremely seriously. Which, having spent a decent portion of my childhood around amateur dramatics, feels reassuringly familiar.

The company bringing it to Abergavenny is Illyria, which has been touring outdoor theatre around Britain for more than 30 years. Their summer shows turn up in gardens, castles and historic sites rather than conventional theatres, which feels exactly right for Pirates.

For this production, six actor-singers take on the whole thing with fully orchestrated accompaniment. It runs for around two hours including an interval, so we're getting a proper operetta rather than a quick piratical gallop before everyone packs up the van.

And the setting is doing some beautiful work here too.

Abergavenny Castle already has the grass, ruins and looming stone walls required to make outdoor theatre feel like a spectacular occasion. Add a picnic, an evening performance and an entire company belting out Gilbert and Sullivan as the light starts to fade, and this feels like a properly excellent summer plan.

It goes ahead rain or shine, naturally, so bring layers, waterproofs and the sort of sturdy optimism traditionally required for British outdoor performance.

There are also no toilets inside the castle grounds during the show, with the nearest ones at Castle Street Car Park. Useful information to discover before opening the second bottle of wine.

I suspect my Grandpa would have approved. And somewhere inside me, Miss Am Dram is warming up too.

Sunday 23 August, 7pm | Abergavenny Castle | £19.50 adults, £9.62 children | family ticket £48.12. Book tickets here.​

A harp, a poet and an imaginary landscape

Imaginary Landscapes is exactly the sort of title that makes me hand over my evening no questions asked and see where it takes me.

Give me poetry, a harp and permission to disappear into somebody else’s imagination for a while and I’m there. Especially when the harp in my head is less cherubs-on-clouds and more Joanna Newsom, all strange beauty, drama and unexpected turns.

This Friday, poet Chris Tutton and harpist Lucy Nolan are bringing their collaboration to Malvern’s intimate Coach House Theatre, with Nolan improvising around Tutton’s words as they’re spoken.

And these are two people who know exactly what they’re doing.

Tutton has published eight poetry collections and was once described by Ned Sherrin as “the master of the short poem”. His work moves through memory, place and all the strange little corners of being human.

Nolan, meanwhile, has played with the BBC Concert Orchestra, Hallé and Royal Northern Sinfonia, performed at the Royal Albert Hall and Jaipur Literature Festival, and has a particular love for taking the harp somewhere less expected. Her playing moves between classical music, improvisation and collaboration, which is exactly what makes this pairing sound so special.

Together, they’ve performed Imaginary Landscapes at Hay Festival and beyond, letting the music grow around the poems as they happen. No two performances are quite the same.

That is the bit I love.

There is something glorious about sitting in a dark little theatre and letting two people take your imagination somewhere completely different for an evening. A poem starts one picture, the harp pulls it somewhere else and suddenly you are miles from wherever you came in.

I am very happy to be taken on this wild ride.

Friday 21 August, 7pm | Coach House Theatre, Malvern | £14

​More info + book here​

Art has escaped into the fields

There are galleries you walk into and then there is The Rodd.

The home of the Sidney Nolan Trust sits in the countryside near Presteigne on a historic Herefordshire farm and estate, with galleries, woodland, riverbank and the old house all forming part of the place. It is one of those destinations where going to see the art involves getting out into the landscape before you have even reached the exhibition.

Which makes it an extremely good home for Earth Photo 2026.

Earth Photo is an international photography and film programme concerned with the environment and the effects of climate change. At The Rodd, selected shortlisted and prize-winning images have been taken out of a conventional gallery and installed outdoors at large scale, scattered through the grounds until the beginning of October.

What a bloomin' lovely idea.

Photography about landscape, consumption, environmental damage and the natural world suddenly has the actual natural world sitting around it. You are walking between images rather than filing past them in a room, with weather, trees, sound and whatever the Herefordshire sky is doing that particular afternoon becoming part of how you see the work.

Earth Photo itself is run in partnership with Forestry England, the Royal Geographical Society and Parker Harris and each year photographers and filmmakers use it to explore our changing relationship with the planet. The work can be beautiful, unsettling, documentary or strange. Previous winning projects have looked at disappearing ice, damaged forests, mining, rising water and lives being reshaped by a changing climate.

The Rodd is also currently showing its first Sidney Nolan Art Prize exhibition, so there is enough here to make a proper day of it.

More than 50 international artworks were selected for the inaugural prize, which invited contemporary artists to respond to Nolan’s restless curiosity and his interest in the world around him rather than imitate his work.

Nolan himself was one of Australia’s major 20th-century artists and spent the later part of his life at The Rodd. There is something pleasing about a place so closely associated with one artist continuing to invite completely new work in, rather than being preserved as a reverential shrine where everyone whispers beside a glass cabinet.

And there is an extra reason to go next Wednesday if you have children who have reached the part of the summer holidays where everybody needs fresh material.

On 26 August, The Rodd is running a sun-printing workshop for 7 to 14-year-olds inspired by Earth Photo. They’ll use cyanotype, one of the earliest photographic processes, placing found objects and natural materials onto light-sensitive surfaces and using sunlight to produce those incredibly vivid blue prints. The session runs from 11am to 2pm.

This is one I’d happily bank even if you can’t make it this week.

There are plenty of exhibitions where you can say, “we’ll catch that sometime” and then forget about them entirely. The Rodd gives you a destination: drive out towards Presteigne, walk the grounds, see something unexpected, perhaps disappear into the woodland for a bit.

Earth Photo + Sidney Nolan Art Prize | The Rodd, near Presteigne | Wed–Sun, 11am–4pm | both exhibitions until 4 October. More info here.​

Going, going… definitely go

There’s something lovely about the bits of local history somebody cared enough to keep.

This weekend Black Bough is opening its Ludlow warehouse for Going, Going, Gone!, an exhibition of old letterpress auction posters and printed pieces connected to the town.

They were made for a very practical reason: to announce sales, list livestock, property and possessions, and tell people where to be and when. Decades later, they’ve become these brilliantly detailed snapshots of Ludlow life, full of old typefaces, familiar names and little clues about what mattered at the time.

What I like most is that they’re still here at all. Somebody kept them, looked after them and understood that these everyday pieces of print were worth holding onto.

Black Bough is usually online-only, so this is also a rare chance to get inside the Portcullis Lane warehouse and have a proper nose around.

There are drinks on Thursday evening to open the exhibition, then it continues through Friday and Saturday alongside the start of Ludlow History Festival.

A small, very Ludlow sort of exhibition, and exactly the kind of thing I’d happily wander into.

Thursday 20–Saturday 22 August | Black Bough, 10 Portcullis Lane, Ludlow. More info here.​

The women’s Tour is coming through

I once signed up for a 100-mile Vélo on a road bike I’d bought a month earlier, having previously ridden about seven miles at most.

Naturally, I then gave myself three months to train. My dad got swept into the plan too, because this is apparently how things work in our family.

I did it, survived it, and have barely been on a bike since. But it left me with enormous respect for anyone who can ride serious distance at serious speed and make it look even vaguely graceful.

So I’ll absolutely be watching when some of the best female cyclists in the world race through the Marches this Saturday for stage four of the Tour of Britain Women.

The route starts in Llanidloes at 11am before taking on 138km of Mid Wales, including the Elan Valley and Knighton, then finishing in Hay-on-Wye at around 2.53pm. It is the penultimate stage of this year’s five-stage Women’s WorldTour race and packs in more than 2,200 metres of climbing.

There are some huge names in the field too, including British sisters Zoe and Elynor Bäckstedt, Pfeiffer Georgi, Lorena Wiebes and Kasia Niewiadoma.

Basically, pick a spot along the route, take snacks and make some noise as they fly past.

I know exactly how much 100 miles hurt me but I cried happy tears every time someone cheered for me. I would therefore like to offer these women my deepest respect from the comfortable safety of the roadside.

Saturday 22 August | Llanidloes → Hay-on-Wye | stage four of the Tour of Britain Women

THE NICE PILE

Céline in the cathedral​
All By Myself echoing around Hereford Cathedral by candlelight feels gloriously excessive in exactly the right way. Saturday 22 August, Hereford Cathedral. More info​

Monks, minstrels and wise women​
Llanthony Priory is filling its ruins with medieval characters, music and stories for the weekend, which seems a very good excuse to head deep into the Black Mountains. Saturday 22 + Sunday 23 August. More info​

Shrewsbury in a sardine tin​
Artists have squeezed their versions of Shrewsbury into empty sardine tins for Town in a Tin, currently sitting up on the Market Hall Viewing Deck before being auctioned for the Perches House Restoration Fund. Until 31 August, Shrewsbury Market Hall. More info​

Something weird, something funky​
DJ Georgie is promising disco, techno, acid, garage, house, jazz, bassline and whatever else feels right at The Globe, for the frankly pleasing ticket price of £2. Saturday 22 August, 8pm, Hay-on-Wye. More info.​

Pooches in the park​
Dog show classes, ridiculous competitions, local treats and an entire day devoted to Powys pooches, raising money for three local dog rescues. Sunday 23 August, The Whole Yard, Brecon. More info​

A night of Delta blues​
The Travelling Riverside Blues Show brings country blues and Americana to the wonderfully intimate Muse in Brecon. Saturday 22 August, 8pm. More info​

Malvern goes loud​
Malvern Rocks spreads live music through venues across the town for three days, with everything from folk and jazz to funk, blues and bands with names like Captain Electrics’ Roller Coaster Band. Friday 21–Sunday 23 August. More info​