April

Easter Weekend

2 - 5 April Adult £150, Child £90

This will be a Bank Holiday weekend full of traditions old and new. We shall blow eggs and paint them, bake hot cross buns and eat them, make bonnets and wear them, tell stories and hear them, hunt for nests and find them, boil eggs and roll them! In fact, egg rolling, on the slopes at Avebury, at 3pm on Easter Sunday, is a highpoint of celebrations!

Participants will be found, sometimes in the craft shed, sometimes in the farm kitchen, sometimes round the fire, sometimes on the high hills, and often in the giant hammock or on the barn swing! It is a celebration for all ages, especially the young in spirit.

We like it. You might too!

Film Festival

Saturday 10 April • 6:30 pm £12

- In conjunction with the Swindon Film Society.

Ticket price is for both films, and includes supper and a double bill of two superb documentaries featuring stunning photography and raising important issues about the sustainability of life in the countryside.

Sleep Furiously is set in a small farming community in mid Wales, where the film-maker grew up  - “…a beguiling, meditative study of the rhythms of rural life”.
Wales, 2009, 95 mins, English/Welsh

Modern Life chronicles a year in the life of farmers in the Haute-Garonne region of France, and engages us with the generations in the community and the legacies that bind them to land and family.
France, 2009, 88 mins, French

Advance tickets for the event are available from Lower Shaw Farm and from the Visitor Centre in Regent Street.

Spring CHICKENS!

with Matt Holland and his feathered flock

6pm Sat 17th April – 2pm Sun 18th April • £60 (£30 Child )
includes Saturday supper, Sunday breakfast and lunch (Accommodation available - £25 per night)

Twenty hours in the life of hens & ducks!

What do you know about hens and ducks? Would you like to know more? Would you like to find out if keeping poultry is right for you? And even if you don’t, or are trying to decide if you do, or are simply interested to know more, would you like to meet hens, get to know ducks, and understand what makes them cluck, quack, and lay?

This will be a highly-informative, hands-on 20 hours with poultry. We will be working with the Lower Shaw Farm flock of hens and ducks, to experience at close quarters what keeps them healthy, happy, and productive.

Matt has been a poultry keeper from the age of five. He reckons that you have not lived till you have seen a chick come out of an egg. He can hypnotise a hen and eats a free-range boiled egg for breakfast every day.

Working Weekend

23 – 25 April • No Charge

This is a chance to get to know the farm, turn your hand to old jobs and new, enjoy good company and good food too!

Our Working Weekends are run in the spirit of the wonderful WWOOF organisation: we feed and accommodate you, you work, with us. No money changes hands. An opportunity to have bright ideas by the compost heap, happy talk in the hen house, and cool chat in the kitchen. Join us to prove that many hands make light work and that today’s stranger is tomorrow’s friend. For more information on WWOOF, see www.wwoof.org.uk.