Dark Skies Festival: How foraging events will help people reconnect with nature in North York Moors

Though she now has an abundance of nature on the doorstep of her Guisborough home, at the foot of the North York Moors, she actually began foraging in Middlesborough town centre, rummaging through the bushes of her local parks.

“It’s easy to think you have to live out in the countryside to get into foraging but this couldn’t be further from the truth,” she explains. “Wild Food is all around us, right under our very noses. It grows under the disguise of ‘weeds’ in our gardens, under our hedgerows and in our green spaces…

"If only people knew the amazing uses and medicinal power of each wild plant, we may all have a better relationship with nature, and we may just live very differently, indeed."

Through Wild Roots Foraging, Lucy works to ‘empower’ communities with ‘lost’ plant knowledge from our ancestors. By exploring wild food, she says people can reduce their use of plastic packaging, benefit their health and help to cut down their carbon footprints.

The organisation is holding two events over the coming days to coincide with the North York Moors and Yorkshire Dales Dark Skies Festival. The festival, taking place between February 10 and 26, is in its eighth year, celebrating the jewels of the night sky in the region.

On February 20, Wild Roots Foraging will hold a Wild Women New Moon Stargazing Circle, an event incorporating, foraging, forest bathing, discussions around a fire, meditation, medicinal teas and wildcrafted food. The evening in Great Ayton will end with a tour of the night sky with Cosmic Wonders.

A Wild Men Foraging and Stargazing session will take place two days earlier on February 18, a relaxed afternoon including a foraging walk, listening circle, stargazing, herbal teas and wildcrafted food.

The session, Wild Roots Foraging’s first Wild Men event of the year, will be held in Hinderwell, North Yorkshire, on land that facilitator Mark Mullis and wife Rose are transforming into a haven for creativity, food growing, wildlife and rest.

The Wild Women and Wild Men groups are about helping individuals to connect with nature, themselves and each other.

“The general community space for men can be quite toxic and can be unabling rather than enabling,” Mark says. “It causes very superficial conversation when sometimes men need to speak at a deeper level and need to be heard.”

Lucy, a member of the Association of Foragers, says she has seen “a lot of poverty” during her life, witnessing close relatives and friends struggling through difficult times.

Eventually it led her to consider how past ancestors didn’t rely on the likes of supermarkets for food, and were much more tuned into the wild edibles growing around them.

Struggling with both mental and physical health issues in her early 20s, Lucy began to research natural remedies that might help, initially “spending a fortune” in health shops before realising she could forage plants herself for free.

Foraging, she says, has become a way of life now in the house that she shares with her husband and two young children.

"From an environmental perspective, we use a lot less plastic now. We’re not going and buying lots of things from the supermarket that are wrapped in plastic, and we try to source as many ingredients as locally as possible, or grow them.”

Mark, formerly a secondary school teacher, is also passionate about low impact eco-living and food growing. His Wild Men sessions also explore land-based skills such as wood carving and fossil hunting.

“Lucy and I both come from a place where we have an understanding that we are nature and it’s part of us,” Mark says. “Anything we do detrimental to its health is detrimental to our health and everything we do positive to its health helps us to grow and thrive.”

To book Wild Roots Foraging events, visit wildrootsforaging.co.uk

For more on the Dark Skies Festival, visit darkskiesnationalparks.org.uk