Beltane at Ashley Court

Images of Hayley by Frank Balbi Hansen. Image of Fiona by Kayleigh Diggle.

Doors open 6:30pm. Poetry from 7pm and Bonfire with dancing (weather permitting outside, otherwise we shall make this an indoor experience) from 8pm. Wild and nutritious foods and drinks available prior and after performances.

In her fourth collection, Midden Witch, Fiona Benson enters the world of familiars, fables and hedge-magic and focuses on the persistent superstition – the fear and false knowledge – that was witchcraft. Telling tales of imagined transformations and spell-casting, these poems present a litany of artists, dreamers and outcasts and a study of their ostracisation.

Fiona looks at how gifted, sometimes troubled, individuals – generally healers, artists, prodigies and almost always women – became scapegoats, victims of societal paranoia and persecution, and were hounded for centuries, often to a gratuitously violent public execution. In Midden Witch, these women speak back to us with…