Community Tent
This year the Community Tent’s theme is Tools
Come and join us for a weekend celebrating and exploring the innately human and incredibly diverse relationships we have with tools. We will be looking into the creativity and resilience that tools can bring to our lives, empowering us to transform our futures.
On Sunday we have an array of talks and interactive events taking place inside of the Community Tent and outside in the village green area…
INSIDE THE TENT (2026)
11.30am
Scraps, Heaps and jumbles – a ‘folk’ bewilderment.
A solo show in which Tim Hill finds himself surrounded by a pile of instruments and noise makers. An unruly bevy of songs, rhymes, tunes, and characters are tapping on his shoulder asking to come in…….
Tim lives in Somerset, where he makes a lot of noise, plays various winds, electronics, toys, and bits and pieces, performs and sings. He revels in and researches our ‘folk’ traditions of ritual, noise, protest and celebration.
His Bandcamp site includes all of this and more.
12.45pm
Samuel Lewis: Self-sufficiency with traditional tools
Samuel Lewis has come from Brittany, France, to talk about how he cultivates his own grains, pulses, vegetables, fruit and wood using just a few simple tools: the hoe, scythe, sickle and billhook.
A self-taught artist, Samuel has been illustrating his daily work for the past 20 years: baking bread in a wood-fired oven; growing, harvesting and threshing his own grains; making cider; cutting and staking hay; coppicing and woodland crafts
2pm
Storytelling with Sarah Mooney
Sarah Mooney, storyteller and host of Mooney's Mythic Podcast, brings her spellbinding storytelling to the Scythe Fayre — conjuring the old tales where elves cobble at midnight, spindles prick fingers into sleep, and silver lipped axes quiver when here is something to cut.
3pm
Common Treasures with Amica Dall
Find out about Common Treasures - an organisation dedicated to creating and implementing practical tools and processes that enable and empower communities, landowners, housing providers and Local Authorities to realise better shared outcomes for rural places and the people that live and work in them.
It brings together people with a broad range of different skills and experiences who are committed to a form of rural development that prioritises communities over profit, promotes agriculture and land stewardship, and generates lasting economic, ecological, and social value.
EXHIBITS INSIDE THE TENT (2026)
Sam Copsey and Emily Diamond
Come and see these magical mechanical sculptures in action within the community tent.
Samuel Lewis
A self-taught artist, Samuel has been illustrating his daily work for the past 20 years: baking bread in a wood-fired oven; growing, harvesting and threshing his own grains; making cider; cutting and staking hay; coppicing and woodland crafts.
Fifty Bees CIC
We will be bringing bees made from wool – a natural fibre that connects us to sheep, meadows, wildflowers, soil, and the people who care for the land. Like wool, bees are part of a living system of relationships that sustain both nature and communities.
FIFTY BEES celebrates these connections through art, bringing together makers, writers, musicians, and communities to explore the links between pollinators, landscapes, and the materials that come from them.
PIZZA & PUPPETS TENT
(OUTSIDE THE COMMUNITY TENT 2026)
Grab a pizza and explore your gardens in ways you’d never expected with this wonderful line up…
2pm
Meadows in my Garden and Rhizopyllia (Talk)
Soil microorganisms created land plants 470 million years ago. Those early plants wicked carbon from the atmosphere and helped develop a stable climate, and food, for life that followed.
Beneficial microbes are now being discovered in all plant tissues including seeds passing on the mother plant's biological elixir. Indeed wildflower meadows are the driving force of habitat restoration following natural disaster or indeed man-made damage, working in close partnership with the soil microbes; the wildflowers feed the microbes with a photosynthetic smorgasbord of sugars, vitamins and enzymes, and in return the microbes supply the plants with a vast array of stress-busting compounds, plant-growth-promoting hormones, and biocontrol agents.
This session is a perspective-shifting illustration of the partnership between above-ground and below-ground biological diversity and function that provides insight for all plant life.
3pm
The Intergalactic Gardeners Club (Puppet show!)
Come and join the intergalactic gardeners club, and grow some plants from outta space… This is an interactive and cosmic experience!
THE VILLAGE GREEN
(OUTSIDE THE COMMUNITY TENT 2026)
The Herbal Spa
The Herbal Spa is back! Please find us in the village green area. We'll have the herbal foot spa, clay face masks, herbal teas and infusions on offer. Plus herbal offerings, such as tea tastings and flower essence tastings.
See timings on the day.
The spa team is a crew of medical herbalists and student medical herbalists. Made up of Julia Bedford, David Cypher, Anya Thompson and Leila Sarraf. All offerings are by donation.
Rima Stains
Artist Rima Staines will be back at the Scythe Fair this year with her magical little wagon art gallery, which you can step inside to be transported to her unique folkloric otherworld landscape of misfits, peasants and magicians.
Rima is an artist whose work straddles myth, magical realism and the folk arts. Her work explores the edges of culture and consciousness in media from painting, music, writing, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, to clock making, mask making, theatre, puppetry, book arts and animation. Rima’s visual world is steeped in melancholy, story-rich and alchemical. Her detailed paintings are often made with oils on found wood - icons rooted in animism that feel simultaneously both strange and familiar.
Instagram: @tilsamka
The Museum of Roadside Magic
Welcome to the Museum of Roadside Magic. The only archive dedicated to the study of folk ritual, plant knowledge and magic, in the repair, maintenance and operation of vehicles.
Within the vitrines you will find a series of vehicular charms and objects of practical ritual. Many of these smaller objects would be used daily, by individuals for protective or remedial uses. Other Items would have been part of grand celebrations, playing integral roles in the seasonal rituals of the road.
Join the Museum of Roadside Magic at 4pm for it’s famed Fantastical Teatime Pageant - an informative and jubilant 40 minute performance, illuminating the world of Roadside Magic through puppetry, stories, and traditional roadlore songs. Join us in a ritual to tune the collective engine, meet members of the Mysterious Order of the Brydes of Tacho and learn about the most beloved of forecourt traditions.
Cone Dancing!
Confusticating games!
A cluster of slightly ridiculous and mildly infuriating games, there are no prizes beyond the inevitable sense that you've probably just wasted some valuable time.
Community Crafting
Join in for a series of make and mend demos and workshops throughout the day, including:
Darning, Visible Mending, Lengthening & Shortening, Adding pockets, Buttons, Knitting Dishcloths, Crocheting Dishcloths, Holey T-shirts, Making t- shirt yarn, Bunting, Hand Sewing, Slow Stitching, Saishko & Kantha Stitching, Boro
The Nowhere Forge
The Nowhere Forge is a totally self-contained, solar and pedal powered blacksmiths workshop where you can come and experience the alchemy of blacksmithing using traditional methods.
Come and try the magic art of knife making, forging a blade, heat treating high carbon steel and sharpening to a razor edge for an essential tool and companion for life.
