« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Waking up the Witch

March 22 @ 12:30 pm - March 24 @ 3:30 pm

An immersive weekend in the South Downs courting the wild and sacred

Gathering together on the evening of Friday 22nd March until the afternoon on the 24th March 2024

A magical immersive weekend focusing on soulful nourishment, myth telling, story weaving, crafting of ceremony and ritual.

This event is now sold out…and we have a waiting list…please click here to join the waiting list.

You are invited to join us at The House at The Edge, a beautiful cottage in the South Downs National Park, accompanied by Emma Collins, Kate Fismer and Alex Galviz, three witchy women who have been unravelled and courted by the wild.

We have danced long nights at the threshold of intuition, magic, and mystery.

We have been dreaming of you, barefooted with the earth between your toes.

We are calling in all those whose hearts yearn for wonder, enchantment, nourishment and boldness.

Are you ready to join us and to court the wild edge?

Is this for me?

If you feel called to explore mythtelling, ceremony and ritual.

If you’re longing to be rooted and claimed by place and to deepen your relationship with the more than human and unseen worlds.

If you seek the profound, the mystical, and the otherworldly.

We are laying a place at our table for you.

Our time together will include:

  • Outdoor wood-fired sauna
  • Ritual and ceremony in our 11 acres of ancient woodland
  • Organic, foraged, homegrown and delicious food
  • Creative writing, myth and storytelling
  • Altar making and medicine walks
  • Foraged tea and syrup-making
  • Divination practices and explorations of power and intuition.
  • Optional wild swimming in a beautiful local mill pond and river

What you will experience:

Deep rest and community from being with us, each other and the house

A renewed love of slow living and belonging to place

Practices and techniques to wake up your witchy self, your spell-making, ritual and ceremonial skills.

A grateful belly, well fed by this land and other local organic growers and makers.

Warm bones heated by the wood-fired sauna in this dark sky and starry place.

Space to grieve and lay down sorrows, to be tended to by others, both the human, unseen and living worlds.

When will this be?

Join us from lunchtime on Friday, 22nd March, to afternoon Sunday, 24th March 2024

Where will this be?

The House at the Edge is in the South Downs National Park, a beautiful dark skies area in the South of England. The food forest garden includes over 60 fruit and nut trees, edible and medicinal herbs, berries and vegetables and cultivated funghi.

The sauna is heated by wood from our woods and chopped by Emma and her coppicing companions.

Ten minutes walk down the lane and across the field is 11 acres of ancient woodland lovingly managed by Emma’s community of coppicers, craftsmen, women and tree lovers.

The nearest train station is Petersfield, and we can arrange pick-ups from there for those arriving by Public Transport.

Exact location will be shared once your booking is confirmed.

Where you will sleep:

The cost of the retreat includes accommodation. There will be a maximum of 6 people on this retreat with the following options:

Double Bedroom to yourself £450

Shared room £300

Luxury campervan £250

The day rate for local people not needing accommodation is £150  Alternatively you can book a room at the Rising Sun Inn in Clanfield

Who we are:

Alexandra Galviz 

Alex is a storyteller, poet, and writer. Four years ago, she was rewilded by woodlands and witches after experiencing a Dark Night of the Soul. She became interested in how we deal with loss and what it can teach us about love. She learnt that creativity can be a pathway to healing, mythology can be the alchemy for transformation, and writing can be a way back home. She is a brave, gentle warrior who is no stranger to an underworld journey. She has spent the last years honing her ancestral gifts as a land healer, energy clearer and akashic record reader. She now blends her inherited magic as a shamanic practitioner and lived experience with thresholds to support people in their own journeys towards authenticity.

Kate Fismer 

Kate is a lover, mother, medicine woman, forager and feeder. She has a deep reverence and love of the alchemy and magic of food and appreciation for the life that it gives. Her love affair with the wild began when she was claimed by the land in Hampshire as a child, growing up on a farm where the trees were her family. She believes that ritual and practice is daily life, as it tethers and steadies the Soul amongst uncertainty, grief and chaos. The magic in the everyday. She was once told she had a wise woman’s chin. And her wish is to walk in this world as if her chin is needed.

Emma Collins 

Emma is a hedge witch, a storyteller and a grief whisperer. She lives in a beautiful house at the edge of the woods with a kitchen that is always preparing for a feast. She gathers people, nettles and stories and weaves them into beautiful tapestries of community, ceremony and rooted living. She spends her days collecting treasure from the forest floor and medicine from the hedgerows. You can mostly find her outside tending the vegetables and herbs in the garden, walking the woods, conjuring blessings from the joys and heartaches of life and making offerings to the moon, the ancestors and forgotten stories of this land. She knows her magic is real, and her spells are conjured from remembered fragments of place-based folk magic and the medicine of her ancestors.

Our Story:

It’s hard to know where our story begins. Or how it came to be.

Is it when a heartbroken Emma, grieving the death of her husband in India, heard a voice telling her to go home and become the old woman of the woods?

Is it when Kate’s stepfather dies, and she finds her way to Emma to tend her grief?

Or when Alex miscarries and Kate invites her to Emma’s woods to be re-wilded by the myth of the Handless Maiden?

Beginnings can be slippery things to pin down…

The seeds for this particular part of the story were planted in July 2019 in the woods at the House at the Edge.

The magic began to weave us together, the roots of the trees and the mycelial threads stitching us all back into place and to each other.

And now, our calling is to support people in re-membering who they are, re-belonging in community and re-rooting to place.

With love and magic,

Emma, Alex and Kate

When?

12.30pm on the 22nd March –  3.30pm on the 24th March 2024

Where?

Private woodland near Clanfield, Hampshire, UK.

Costs?

Sliding scale: £150 – £450  Depending on your accommodation choices.

FAQ

Click here for answers to frequently asked questions and what to bring.

Details

Start:
March 22 @ 12:30 pm
End:
March 24 @ 3:30 pm