Wild About Wood 2013

Looking across the coracle pool to the Discovery Zone and beyond.

 This weekend saw the Yorkshire Arboretum's annual Wild About Wood Festival, our principal fundraising event of the year. For a small organisation it's a huge task to get it off the ground and although the whole team is involved, along with 80 stalwart volunteers, much of the work falls on the shoulders of Anna Porter, our Marketing Manager, with her hard work and meticulous planning paying-off on the day. The festival's attractions include vendors and exhibitors, mostly trading in and working with wood and wooden products, but diversifying into a broad range of related activities. Our own education department runs the Discovery Zone, an assemblage of activities for children on various themes of natural history and incredibly popular, with some activities booking up very quickly indeed - at least one family came back for the second day having been unable to complete all the options on the first!

Saturday (when these pictures were taken) was a lovely day and we had a record turn-out, but the forecast for Sunday was dire and although it turned out less bad than predicted, it had evidently put a lot of people off. Despite this, and the occasional heavy showers, everyone seemed to be remarkably happy and having a great time. Financial success is something to hope for from such events, but to judge by the very many, very happy people I saw around the arboretum on both Saturday and Sunday, it was certainly a success with our visitors. 

Rosie Adcock and Bridget Bullivant demonstrate the magnificent minibeast habitat and bee hotel known as Bugkingham Palace.

Horse-logging demonstrated under the larches.

The Wye Valley Axemen demonstrated remarkable skills with their axes, rather alarmingly wearing only what seemed to be ordinary trainers...

Henry Brown puts an oak log through his Wood Mizer: a very popular demonstration for our visitors and providing us with some very useful timber for future projects.

To add diversity, Castle Howard mason Mark Reeves encouraged kids to have a go at carving in stone.

Bustling activity at the heart of the festival, with music provided by Shiftipig.

My Transylvanian friend Razvan Chisu found an item of interest from the ice cream van.