Hello!
Welcome to June. We’re looking forward to getting out and about this month. We’ve lots to share so lets get to it…
We’ve lots of events news to bring you this month, first up a screening of Our Land on June 9th at Verdant Taproom in Penryn. You can nab tickets here.
On June 13th we are headed to Stroud for an evening of stones and mystery at House of Goblin. Its going to be lots of fun, you can find tickets for that here.
Then on June 29th we’re back at The Social in London for an evening of trees and magic! We’ll have a screening of No Trees No Seas, films from Julian Hand and a live sonic ritual from Justin Robertson. You can get tickets here
We’ve lots of things to share this month from members so buckle in!
Firstly from Annabel Pettigrew
Medieval Tile Making Workshop
Spend the day learning how to make encaustic tiles using traditional techniques at this one-day workshop. You will carve, cast and decorate tiles ready to be fired in the kiln at the studio in the heart of Frome.
Tiles will be ready to collect approximately 2 weeks after the workshop. Workshop fees cover all materials and firing costs.
Over 18s only.
Please wear clothes that you are happy get messy in.
You can find more information here
An exhibition sent to us by Gareth Evans
Ian McKeever: Seven Stones
Exhibition: 9 June 2026 – 1 August 2026
HackelBury presents Ian McKeever: Seven Stones, an exhibition of photographs taken at the Neolithic Henge Monument in Avebury, Wiltshire.
Made in 2017 using a medium-format analogue camera and printed in 2025, these works reflect McKeever’s fascination with the physical presence of the stones; their mass and heft and the sense of time and permanence which they embody.
Seven Stones forms part of McKeever’s philosophical exploration and long-standing dialogue and symbiotic relationship between painting and photography, presence and absence, time and materiality.
From R S Kendle:
Lithophonics: The Poetry Of Stones And Deep Time is a two hour on-line creative writing workshop, taking place via Zoom from 10:00 to 12:00 on 27-06-2026.
Explore our relationship with stones, geology, and deep time, in this creative writing workshop, as part of the Scottish Geology Festival.
During this session we will tap into the long history of stones, and the ways in which we are interconnected; from the ancient stone circles and cairns that hold our histories, to the stories we carve into standing stones.
We will consider how we can relate to stones, what they can teach us, and how we can gently mine their songs.
No prior knowledge of geology or experience in creative writing is required – the workshop will be a gentle and supportive space to create, explore, and reflect.
This event is being held as part of the Scottish Geology Festival.
You can find tickets here
Find full event listings for the festival here
About The Facilitator
R S Kendle is a poet and creative practitioner from the north-east of Scotland. A winner of The Poetry Archive’s WordView, and Best Of The Net nominee, they have also been long-listed in Black Cat Poetry Press’ 2024 and 2025 competitions. Their work has been featured in several anthologies and digital publications, including Acropolis Journal, Azarão Lit Mag, Clarion, Dust Poetry, and The Winged Moon. Find them on Instagram @rskendle.
Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra
Gabble Ratchets - A supernatural journey through the Upper Calder Valley by a lineup of 7 - 10 year old children.
The Gabble Ratchets, also known as Gabriel Ratchets, are a pack of hellhounds who, at least in the version of the tale told in Todmorden, run their wild hunt each Halloween; from the zoomorphic outcrop Eagle Cragg to the summit of Stoodley Pike, a hill now marked with a monument to the end of the Napoleonic Wars but perhaps once the site of a prehistoric
burial mound. That ‘gabble’ may be an old term for ‘corpse’ has led some to speculate that the hound’s spectral journey may be an echo of an earlier corpse road or burial route and it is this idea that the PPYO have run with. Using percussion, homemade bowed strings and piano the trail is traced past the landmarks along the way
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The children who play on Gabble Ratchets are students at Cornholme School near Todmorden, aged 7-10 with a 50/50 split of PPYO veterans and new members. Beyond initial prompts from director Mark S. Williamson, the music is the children’s own; their attempts to create the atmosphere of location and journey in the Upper Calder Valley.
About the primitive percussion youth orchestra:
Founded by Mark S. Williamson (spaceship/crock oss/stone reports) in 2016, the Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra is a youth orchestra performing improvised and semi-improvised music using the stuff that lies around gathering dust in school music cupboards. The orchestra welcomes young people with any or no pre-existing musical experience and seeks to encourage listening, cooperation, expression and ownership of the music created by its members. The orchestra has found homes in the schools in which Williamson as taught in his former role as a primary school music teacher and in workshop form at arts centres and festivals. The orchestra also manifested as a two day film scoring workshop for young adults for Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and has an ongoing branch at a primary school in Todmorden. In 2022, the PPYO opened Jake Blanchard and Sophie Cooper’s Tor Fest at Todmorden Unitarian Church, kick starting a programme headlined by Richard Dawson and in 2024 and 2025 created Music for Ghost Trains at Full of Noises in Barrow for the Furness Model Railway Club where they also recorded ‘Warwickshire’ for the Folklore Tapes Ceremonial Counties series. In Summer 2025 the PPYO returned to HCMF and a workshop at Supernormal Festival led straight to a performance on the festival stage. Members of the PPYO were also winners of the children’s category of the 2024 Sound of the Year Awards
The orchestra was also recently the subject of the Radiophonic Institute’s Radiophonic Podcast and pieces from their 2024 release ‘We Demand...Everything Now!’ were featured on the Radio 3 New Music Show.
You can listen here
This month’s book of the month is Bride of Quietness: Ithell Colquhoun in Cornwall by Rupert White.
This book was hotly anticipated by us. We loved Rupert’s previous explorations into Cornwall including (but not limited to) the Reenchanted Landscape and Magic and Modernism so to discover he had embarked on this project was very exciting, we’d been following along the Instagram account @ithellslivingstones for a while hoping for a write up of his brilliant research and thankfully he delivered!
Bride of Quietness takes in each chapter of artist and writer Ithell Colquhoun’s book The Living Stones. It is a voyage of discovery into the who, what and where of The Living Stones including a lot of primary research and many new discoveries. It’s a truly remarkable piece of work and one which we know will be of interest to any Ithell, Cornwall or indeed standing stones fan.
The Midsummer bumper issue is here! Stones in Wiltshire, Stones in Cumbria, Stones in Cornwall. It’s full to the brim with 52 pages of stoney goodness.
You can find the full issue here
As ever thanks for reading, and don’t forget to send us any news you want to share for next month
Lally and Matthew x
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