Walking Up Hills, Looking at the Sky, and Remembering We Are Nature

There seems to have been a lot of walking up hills at Splatt Farm Gardens lately.

It started with Lughnasa, when a group of us headed up into the Quantock Hills together to mark this old seasonal festival, which falls at the beginning of August, halfway between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. Traditionally, Lughnasa marks the beginning of the harvest, that wonderful turning point in the year when all the invisible work of spring and early summer begins to become something tangible; something that can be picked, gathered, cooked and shared.

There is something about walking to mark an occasion that feels different from simply arriving somewhere. As we made our way upwards through the Quantocks, the landscape slowly opened around us and the pace of walking gave us time to talk, to notice, to be together and, perhaps most importantly, not to be in too much of a hurry to get anywhere. There wasn't a ceremony waiting at the top or anything particularly dramatic that needed to happen when we arrived. We simply climbed, looked out across the landscape and allowed ourselves to notice where we were, both on the hill and in the year.

Then we came back down to the land and gathered around the table for a shared feast.

There is something beautifully complete about celebrating Lughnasa that way: walking out into the wider landscape and then returning home to eat together from the landscape we tend ourselves. We brought what we could from the garden, other people added things to the table, food was cooked and passed around, and for a while we simply sat together and ate.

Admittedly, if ever there were a year to challenge romantic ideas about the abundance of harvest, this might be it. Somerset has been baking through a long, dry summer and the garden is feeling it. The ground is parched, plants are stressed and an impressive number of things that we had hoped would become dinner have instead decided to bolt determinedly towards seed. There is something mildly heartbreaking about lovingly tending a plant for months only to watch it bypass the part where it feeds you and head enthusiastically towards reproduction instead. #sadface.

But perhaps that made this particular Lughnasa feast more meaningful rather than less.

For the people who marked the harvest centuries ago, celebrating it could never have meant pretending that every year produced overflowing baskets of perfect vegetables. The weather mattered. Rain mattered. A poor harvest mattered enormously. Their relationship with the land contained uncertainty as well as abundance, and ours does too, however much modern life sometimes allows us to pretend otherwise.

Sitting around our table this year, we weren't celebrating some idealised version of the harvest. We were celebrating what there actually was. Some food had come from the garden, some had come from elsewhere, and different people had contributed different things. The feast wasn't an expression of endless abundance so much as an expression of gratitude and community: this is what we have, this is what each of us has brought, and we can put it in the middle of the table and share it.

Even the plants bolting to seed begin to look different when you stop seeing the garden solely in terms of what it can produce for us. They aren't failing at all. Faced with heat and drought, they are responding exactly as living things do, putting their energy into survival and into creating whatever comes next. There is a lesson in that too, and perhaps a more interesting one than the garden simply behaving exactly as we wanted it to.

That is part of what I love about marking the Wheel of the Year. The seasons aren't themes we impose upon the land; the land tells us what the season actually is.

A little while after Lughnasa, we found ourselves walking up another hill.

This time it was a different collection of people from our community, and we headed onto Exmoor as the sun was going down, looking for somewhere high and dark enough to watch the meteor shower. As daylight disappeared and the landscape around us dissolved into darkness, we lay back and waited for the sky to do something.

There is a particular feeling that comes from being beneath a genuinely dark sky. The world becomes enormous and you become incredibly small, but somehow that smallness doesn't necessarily make you feel insignificant. For me, it often does the opposite. There is something comforting about remembering that life is unfolding on scales far beyond the tiny world of emails, appointments, plans and problems that can so easily fill our attention.

Meteor watching also requires a kind of patience that modern life doesn't ask of us very often. You can't scroll more quickly to get to the next one. You can't press play. Someone sees a streak of light and shouts, everyone else turns their head approximately half a second too late, and then there is nothing to do except laugh, settle back down and keep looking.

Eventually another one comes.

And because you had to wait for it, you really notice it.

A few days later we were climbing upwards again, this time to watch an eclipse, carrying what may be my favourite piece of astronomical equipment: an ordinary kitchen colander. As the light from the Sun passed through its tiny holes, the shape of the eclipse appeared over and over again in miniature in the shadows beneath us. Something unimaginably vast was taking place between the Earth, Moon and Sun, and there it was being revealed to us through something normally used to drain pasta.

It was ridiculous and magical at the same time.

Somewhere amongst all this hill walking, eating, waiting and looking upwards, I've been thinking about why I find these moments so important, and why they increasingly feel connected to what we're trying to create at Splatt Farm Gardens.

For most of human history, the changing seasons weren't a decorative backdrop to people's lives. They were life. People knew when particular plants appeared, when animals migrated, when the light changed and when the harvest should begin. The movement of the Sun and Moon mattered. Rain mattered. Frost mattered. Communities gathered around these transitions because everyone was living within the same rhythms.

The Wheel of the Year gives names to some of those moments: Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa and Samhain, with the solstices and equinoxes between them, and while those festivals have spiritual histories, I don't think you need to follow any particular spiritual tradition to find something meaningful in celebrating them now. At their simplest, they give us a reason to pay attention.

They invite us to notice that the blackberries are ripening, that the evenings are shortening, that the smell of the air has changed after rain, that something we planted months ago has quietly become food. They invite us to look at the moon, to notice the darkness and perhaps even to notice the ways our own bodies and energies shift as the year changes around us.

There is something quietly spiritual in that for me, but not in a way that requires anyone else to believe anything. It is more a remembering of our place within something much larger: nature. We are not seperate from it and yet sometimes it feels that we have forgotten that we are a part of it.

We talk a lot about connecting with nature, and lately I've been wondering whether even that phrase creates a separation that isn't really there. Nature isn't somewhere else that we have to travel to in order to reconnect with it. Our bodies respond to daylight and darkness. We breathe because plants breathe. We eat because soil, fungi, insects, rain and sunlight make food possible. The same Earth beneath the garden is beneath the Quantocks and Exmoor, and the same planet is moving through the sky we were staring into as we waited for meteors.

We aren't separate from nature. We are nature. Perhaps what we have lost isn't the connection itself, but the habit of noticing it.

This idea is becoming increasingly central to what we're creating at Gather & Grow Forest School here in Somerset. We don't want nature to become another subject that children are taught. Nor do we particularly want to take children outdoors only to recreate a classroom in a field. We want children to spend enough time with the land that a relationship begins to form naturally.

A child plants something and returns the following week to discover that it has changed. They begin to know where the insects gather, which parts of the garden are shady, where the chickens like to hide and what happens when there hasn't been enough rain. They turn over a log and discover an entire world underneath it. They pick something they planted, taste it, decide it's disgusting and feed it to a chicken. They experience the seasons not because somebody has shown them four pictures labelled spring, summer, autumn and winter, but because they have actually been outside long enough to feel the difference.

And all the while, learning is happening.

Building a den brings measurement, shape, balance, negotiation and problem solving into something that matters to the child doing it. Growing food opens up conversations about soil, weather, insects, nutrition and seasons. Stories emerge around fires and beneath trees. Counting happens because there is something worth counting. Writing can have a purpose because there is something worth recording. Science can begin with an adult explaining the solar system, but it can also begin when a child looks at the ground during an eclipse and suddenly asks why there are dozens of tiny crescent Suns appearing through a colander.

That is the kind of learning we want to make room for at Gather & Grow. Our qualified teachers can bring their knowledge of the primary curriculum and gently weave it through the experiences that emerge, offering activities, ideas and resources that might take a child's curiosity a little further, but without needing to determine in advance exactly where that curiosity should lead.

There also needs to be room for nothing much to happen.

A child lying in the grass isn't necessarily waiting for learning to begin. A child who has spent twenty minutes watching an insect hasn't wasted twenty minutes. A child sitting quietly in the den with a book or simply watching everyone else may be doing exactly what they need to do in that moment.

Sometimes paying attention is enough.

Perhaps this is why the apparently different things happening at Splatt Farm Gardens keep finding their way back to the same place. People come to our nature campsite near Bridgwater and discover that simply sleeping outside changes their relationship with the day. Darkness actually becomes dark. Morning arrives around you. You hear birds settling at night and waking again in the morning. The weather becomes something you experience rather than something you glance at on an app.

People come here to volunteer and spend a few hours with their hands in the soil. We grow food, eat together, gather around fires and mark seasonal moments. Later this year we're hoping to open an outdoor sauna here in Somerset, and even that feels like another expression of the same invitation: to slow down enough to inhabit your body, feel warmth and cold, step outside and notice the landscape around you.

Forest School, camping, growing food, community gatherings, sauna, shared feasts and repeatedly walking up hills carrying inappropriate kitchen utensils might look like a collection of unrelated activities from the outside. To me, they are increasingly beginning to feel like different doors into the same place.

They are invitations back into relationship: with our bodies, with each other, with the land and with the strange, beautiful planet underneath our feet.

So I hope we keep walking up hills.

There will always be reasons not to. Someone will be tired, the weather will look questionable, we'll be busy, the children won't want to put their shoes on and somebody will inevitably have forgotten the snacks. But I hope we keep marking Lughnasa and noticing the solstices and equinoxes. I hope we watch for the first signs of spring and notice when autumn begins to arrive. I hope we occasionally stay outside long enough for our eyes to adjust to darkness.

Most of all, I hope our children grow up knowing not only the names of the seasons but what those seasons actually feel like. What August smells like. What happens to a garden in a drought. Where the best blackberries grow. What frost does to a field. How enormous the sky becomes when you get away from the streetlights. What it feels like to eat something together that grew in the soil beneath your feet.

And how astonishing it is that you can stand on a Somerset hillside holding an ordinary kitchen colander and watch the movement of worlds.

The old festivals of the Wheel of the Year can sound, from the outside, mystical or removed from everyday modern life. But perhaps what they offer us is actually very simple: a reason to gather, a reason to go outside, a reason to share what we have, a reason to look up and a reason to notice where we are in the year and who is standing beside us.

A reminder that the natural world isn't somewhere we visit when we have time.

It's where we belong.

Gather & Grow is our small, child-led Forest School near Bridgwater, Somerset, based at Splatt Farm Gardens in Spaxton. Our qualified teachers gently weave primary curriculum learning through nature, play, practical skills and children's own curiosity. Splatt Farm Gardens is also home to our simple Somerset nature campsite, community garden and, coming later this year, our outdoor sauna.

Find out more about Forest School, camping and everything we're growing at Splatt Farm Gardens at www.splattfarmgardens.co.uk.