![]() To (almost) quote the famed line from Jaws, we’re going to need a bigger tent. There’s far more brilliance on show than we could ever manage to cram into this review, but here are the 50-odd sets that’ve left us thoroughly broken at the end of an unbelievable weekend… What’s more out of this world is how this grassroots gathering has managed to grow into a celebration of all things alternative while retaining its gorgeous Cotswold character: the local Women’s Institute selling baked goods within spitting distance of Texan bruisers Kublai Khan TX dropping some of the nastiest beatdowns you’ve ever heard dairy products from cattle in the surrounding fields available to soothe throats torn to shreds after shouting along to genre-busting Japanese heroes Paledusk. There are a late-night blank patches in our memory but, in fairness, that’s probably more to do with too many of the festival’s trademark ‘beeros’ than any extraterrestrial incursion. ![]() But we learned to wear the name with pride.The festival artwork for 2000trees is UFO-themed for 2023, imagining flying saucers swooping over the thick woodland around Cheltenham’s Upcote Farm to whisk punters to another world. Weyward, they called us, when we would not submit, would not bend to their will. It was men who marked us so, in the time when language was but a shoot curling from the earth. We did not need stonemasons to carve our names into rock as proof we had existed.Īll we needed was to be returned to the wild. Instead, the Weyward bones rested in the woods, in the fells, where our flesh fed plants and flowers, where trees wrapped their roots around our skeletons. Our ancestors-the women who walked these paths before us, before there were words for who they were-did not lie in the barren soil of the churchyard, encased in rotting wood. Why the crows-the ones who carry the sign-watch over us and do our bidding, why their touch brings our abilities into sharpest relief. ![]() ![]() That is why roots and leaves yield so easily under our fingers, to form tonics that bring comfort and healing. ![]() The animals, the birds, the plants-they let us in, recognizing us as one of their own. We can feel it, she said, the same way we feel rage, sorrow, or joy. There was something about us-the Weyward women-that bonded us more tightly with the natural world. ![]()
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