There’s something of interest for walkers of all abilities in this year’s expanded programme for the Bathscape Walking Festival.
With just over a week to go before the start of the festival, the organisers have worked hard to ensure some of the walks align with the theme of the Climate and Biodiversity Festival — taking action for your community
A three-mile tour of some of the local community growers will be led by Transition Bath on September 25. Walkers will visit the new Roots allotment site at Newbridge where individual plot holders grow for their own use and the well-established community garden of Bath Organic Group at the Lower Common site where people grow crops to share as well as creating surplus for the monthly Farmers’ Market stall.
There will also be an opportunity to explore what people have been doing for wildlife in their own gardens on September 24. In Combe Down, a two-hour walk will be led by Ann Stuart and members of the Wild about Bath group. In Whiteway a walk taking in Bath City Farm, Whiteway Green and residents’ gardens will look at how they connect to the wider city scape and how this corner of Bath is tackling food resilience, biodiversity and enhancing the mosaics of habitat. The walk will be led by members of Blooming Whiteway. Booking is essential for all these free events.
On that same afternoon, a short walk around the city centre will be discuss the geology that allowed the hot springs to form and explore how to tackle climate change at a regional river catchment level.
Climate change and taking action for wildlife are always popular topics and some extra family walks have recently been added to the programme: a Family Nature Walk at Bath City Farm on September 10 with foraging, nature spotting and bug hunting and a Family walk of roughly two miles from the Roundhill, Mount Road, Southdown towards Englishcombe village and back.
Councillor Manda Rigby, cabinet member for Transport, said: “Bath & North East Somerset is unique in having a rich, green and varied landscape within easy reach. The Bathscape Walking Festival and the Somer Valley Festival, which it incorporates, enable people to make discoveries within easy reach of their home and these additional events will allow people to explore the themes of climate change and taking action for wildlife.”
The programme includes more than 60 free walks and events. If you can’t make it on the dates, you can still take advantage of this year’s virtual festival, which features a new collection of self-guided walking trails, produced in partnership with Cotswolds National Landscape and the volunteer route testers. You can find the walking trails on the digital map https://www.bathscape.co.uk/map/ and download the accompanying trail guide. Walks available are of different lengths, include wheel friendly walks and sensory walks.
The annual Bathscape Walking Festival starts in on September 10 and the last event is on September 25 with the Julian House Circuit of Bath.
The programme of events can be found https://www.bathscape.co.uk/walking-festival/ or you can email info@bathscape.co.uk or call 01225 477265 to find out more.
If you’d like to hear more about what’s coming up in the Festival, September’s episode of the Bathscape Footprints podcast is all about walking. You can listen here or wherever you get your podcasts https://footprints.captivate.fm/
Bathscape’s work is largely funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund with match funding from partners. To find out more visit the website.
