Peat matters at Glastonbury Festival
We are launching Peat-Fest South-West on Bog Day, Sunday 27th July!
With RE-PEAT, we have made a plan for the day to experience a peaty and mossy landscape through performance, story telling, on VR, listening to bog’s gurgles on a silent disco, and finally going for an explore in search of bogs.
It is free, and you can book here (so we know roughly how many teas and cakes to organise)! Peat Fest South-West is supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and we are grateful to National Lottery players.
Its brilliant Bog Day on 27th July - celebrate it at our Peat-Fest South-West Launch.
As part of Peat-Fest South-West we made new and creative ways to encourage people to get close to peaty matters while we were at Glastonbury Festival in the Green Futures Field.
As people touch the nature and the art, so different voices are heard of a better future as we create, care and connect.
A Be More Moss portal welcomed everyone with solar artworks of moss. People touched and connected the paws of a tardigrade,(the most resilient creature on the planet) and lit their way through inside. It got people thinking about the role of the sun and resilience to our changing climate. Then came the invitation to touch and look closely through a hand lens to look at the star of the show - peat forming sphagnum moss (or pom pom moss as some call it!) in the centre of our roundhouse space.
Sphagnum in the centre and mosses from pavements and moorland around the outside.
Looking closely at mosses in our round house display
A small piece of peatland from Challacombe Farm, Dartmoor, since returned!
The Mossy Carpet adorned the walls of the roundhouse, inspired by peatlands of Dartmoor, and the positive climate impact of many mosses living together and making the environment better for us all to thrive. Each small moss taking tiny actions, adding up to a massive positive difference to our world.
As people touched and walked around the round house, there were mossy and peaty factoids to read and react to.
Then next door was an opportunity to make the mossy experience into a mossy woolly pom-pom to add to The Mossy Carpet. In its last year of making, this carpet is now more than 75m long. You can still join in and make more…
Moss inspired pompom making at Glastonbury 2025 - creativity for all ages!
Just up from us is a stall run by The Wildlife Trusts which is also telling stories of peat - how to measure it’s depth in history, feeling the moss grown in a box, dragonfly tatoos, a peatza game for factoids and inspiration. We met fabulous staff there including Kaye Brennan, Head of Campaigning and Organising for The Wildlife Trusts. We exchanged our peat offerings and wise words, agree that a creative approach sets up new lines of communication and connection. We enjoyed talking and sharing with you Kaye, even with the Glasto sound backdrop! Watch our film clips via Youtube.
Finally we asked about our relationship to climate and environmental change - what small moss like simple acts are we doing to save the planet? We asked the tardigrade (totally resilient microscopic mossy pig or water bear) to listen to peoples small and individual actions and celebrate them in the orange telephone kiosk.
We gathered nearly 1000 messages of promise and hope, people talking to the tardigrade!
Our peatland experiences at events and exhibitions rely on getting creative, feeling your way into another world that could be yours. It is great to feel the sense in moss, touching and crafting pompom mosses, feeling the cool, the soft, the damp.
On Bog Day, Sunday 27th July we are inviting restorers, landscape makers and the public to experience the reality of the significance of peat in our landscapes. Come along to Sterts Arts and Environmental Centre, and explore a small part of Cornwall close to the Devon borders for peatland connections and look forward to the rest of the year sharing what is special about the Peatland Landscapes in the South-West.
PS. If you can’t join us for Bog Day, why not support the Grande Finale of the Mossy Carpet through our Crowdfunder - every £ counts!
