Marches & More

Pumpkins by day. Nightmares by night. Townsend Farm, Pembridge | October 2026 I love being scared. I once watched a horror film every single day for a month, entirely voluntarily. Thirty days of jump scares, questionable decisions in dark basements and people who really should have left the house when the lights started flickering. Glorious. So you can imagine my delight at discovering that a farm in Pembridge has managed to create the sort of autumn outing that appeals to two very different...

BUILTH’S ARTS CENTRE TURNS 50, AND IT’S THROWING THE WHOLE BUILDING OPEN Wyeside Arts Centre celebrates with three days of films, live music, poetry, local history and a new commission inspired by the River Wye. I have a huge soft spot for local arts centres. I spent a big chunk of my own childhood performing in one, which in retrospect probably kept me busy enough to avoid at least a reasonable amount of low-level misbehaviour. I also think places like this matter far beyond whatever happens...

HAY HAS GONE COMPLETELY FUNGAL Mushroom cocktails, psychedelic folklore and one deeply unserious line dance This weekend Hay-on-Wye becomes Fungi Town, a three-day takeover devoted to the weird, beautiful and surprisingly important world of mushrooms, toadstools, lichens, moulds and yeasts. And they've really committed. You can learn lino printing using inks made from mushrooms, bring your compost along to be examined under a microscope, browse a fungal emporium at Hay Castle or hear an RHS...

BEFORE WE GET INTO IT BEFORE WE GET INTO IT Three weeks into my little boy starting school, and life currently revolves around after-school clubs, an intense Riot and Ritual brand project and trying to keep my very tired four-year-old awake long enough to eat his tea. It’s made me think even more about what MAM is really for. Finding joy where we live. Getting out and doing nice things, whether that’s on our own, with our kids, with old friends or with the new ones we find along the way. And...

I HAVE FINALLY FOUND MY KIND OF RAVE Abergavenny is dancing at 9am There was a time when going raving meant getting home at approximately the same time I now consider a perfectly respectable hour to start doing laundry. Life moves on. The Awake Collective is bringing its second morning rave to Kahve on Lewis Lane in Abergavenny this Sunday, with DJs, dancing and coffee from 9am until 11am. No booze. No staying out until four. No losing the entire following day to existential dread and beige...

FOUR DAYS DEEP IN FOLK Bromyard Folk Festival takes over the town this weekend with music, stories, ceilidhs, sessions and the kind of communal joy that folk does better than almost anything Bromyard Folk Festival is back this weekend, bringing four days of concerts, ceilidhs, workshops, storytelling, dance and impromptu sessions to the town. It’s one of those festivals where the big names matter, of course, but they’re only part of the appeal. The real magic is in everything happening around...

Follow the pink signs h.Art is back this Saturday, and if you’ve never done it properly, this is the year to stop pretending you’ll “have a look sometime”. For nine days, 400 artists across 134 venues open up studios, workshops, galleries, barns, chapels, gardens and all sorts of other places you’d usually have absolutely no business wandering into. That’s the bit I love about h.Art. You’re not just looking at finished work on a wall. You’re seeing where it was made, meeting the person who...

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...

Russell Howard in a brand-new Hereford big top I have a real soft spot for people building new places for us to go, so The Amp has immediately got my attention. The Courtyard has basically plonked an enormous Big Top on its Hereford site for the summer and filled it with people you would usually expect to travel considerably further to see. The Amp, short for The Courtyard Amplified, holds around 1,400 people, making it Herefordshire’s largest live performance space. It is deliberately...