Event

This year The Elmet Trust is hosting two mini festivals - The Ted Hughes Birthday Festival in August and an autumn festival in October when the winners of The Ted Hughes Young Poet's Award and The Elmet Poetry Prizewinner will be announced.

Just to whet your appetite, here's what's happening in Mytholmroyd this Summer...

See you at the festival...!

Saturday 15th August

Boyhood Days - A Walk with Donald Crossley

A guided walk in and around Mytholmroyd looking at the inspirations for many of Ted Hughes' poems.

Start time: 1.30pm

Meeting Point: The War Memorial, Mytholmroyd

Difficulty: Moderate

Length: 3-4 miles, approx. 3 hours

Tickets £5/£4 concs

Hughes in Heptonstall - A walk with John Billingsley

A guided walk around the Hughes family connections in Heptonstall.

Start time: 5.00pm

Meeting Point: Weaver's Square, Heptonstall

Difficulty: Easy

Length: 2-3 miles, approx 2 hours

Tickets £5/£4 concs

9.00pm Poetry Slam with Charlotte Walker

Erringden Room, Mytholmroyd

Charlotte Walker is a Huddersfield based poet who led the Albert Poets group. Come along and share your own poems and have some fun. Bar available.

FREE EVENT

 

Sunday 16th August

Laureate's Landscape - a walk with John Billingsley

A guided walk of the landscape that Ted Hughes's poems inhabit.

Start time: 10.00am

Meeting Point: Mytholmroyd Station

Difficulty: Moderate/Strenuous - steep ascent up to Midgley Moor. Walking boots & waterproofs essential.

Length: 4.5 miles, approx 4hours

Tickets £5/£4 concs

Crimsworth Dean - A Walk with Donald Crossley

A guided walk up the valley of Crimsworth Dean where Ted Hughes found inspiration for many poems, including ‘Six Young Men'.

Start Time: 3.00pm

Meeting point: National Trust car park at Hardcastle Crags

Difficulty: moderate

Length: 3-4 miles, approx 3 hours

Tickets: £5/£4 concs

Ted Hughes Birthday Dinner

Erringden Room, Mytholmroyd

Come and join us for a three course meal to celebrate the birthday of the late poet, and listen to Gaia Holmes talk about Ted Hughes' influence on her own work, and about the landscape which has inspired them both.

Gaia Holmes is a free-lance writer and an associate lecturer in Creative Writing at Huddersfield University. Her debut poetry collection Dr James Graham's Celestial Bed was published by Comma Press in 2006. She is currently working on her second collection.

Time: 7.30 for 8pm

Tickets: £20 for three course meal and glass of wine (vegetarian option available)

 

Monday 17th August

We are opening a new stretch of the River Calder for a day's fishing in celebration of the birthday of Ted Hughes, who was, himself, a keen fisherman.

3pm Fly Fishing on the River Calder, Mytholmroyd

6.30pm Pie and Peas in the Erringden Room

7.00pm Pete Morgan in the Erringden Room

Poet Pete Morgan is a sea fisherman. Tonight he reads his poetry, and talks about fishing and how it has influenced his own life and work.

Pete Morgan, a Lancastrian by birth and Yorkshireman by adoption, is a professional poet. "There are famous poets of my generation and younger who have no idea of the debt they owe to Pete Morgan. His poems are dramatic, formally superb, funny, toughly tender, lyrical and never less than entertaining. Ted Hughes was a fan of his." Carol Ann Duffy

Tickets: £10 for all day, £5 for Pie and Peas and Pete Morgan