Summer Forest Club – connecting with nature in the Selwood Forest

Four highly experienced local bushcraft and outdoor learning experts have teamed up to create nature-connected, full-day, summer holiday experiences for children. Responding to a child’s natural instinct to play and explore, these parent-free adventures are joyfully full of shelter building, fire making, cooking delicious food together over the fire, wood craft, storytelling and, of course, lots of games – with time built in to chill out under the canopy of the trees in a ‘woodland camp’ nestled within the grounds of the 42 Acres retreat, near Witham Friary.

The ’Five Rivers Summer Forest Club’ team include Ben Gray, who trained with Ray Mears and has worked in TV with Bear Grylls and for Animal Planet (BBC), Chasing Ocean Giants (Discovery) and Gold Rush (Discovery), as well as Rhiannon Swannell, an Africa-qualified field guide, local outdoor education specialist Kevin Button and bushcraft instructor and forest school leader Luke Newman.

Promoting links between nature, health and happiness, children can, by prior arrangement, be dropped off as early as 8.30 to help busy working parents. As Luke Newman, father and blended-family parent of two boys and a girl tells us: “As parents ourselves we really ‘get’ that parents need to continue to work, secure in the knowledge that their children are happy and safe – and, hopefully, a bit worn out and kind of muddy by tea-time too!”

Three of the team are also mentors in Journeyman UK, a charity dedicated to supporting boys to navigate their path to manhood and it was the group’s experiences in leading, teen and adult workshops in this most special of locations which motivated them to create a low-cost summer holiday opportunity for children, giving the same free ranging connection to nature that childhood summers used to offer but which, for so many, is now lost.

If you would like to know more about Five Rivers Summer Forest Club, running from 27th July onwards, email Rhiannon at connect@fiverivers.life and she will be happy get back to you

Prices starting from £30 a day (for 5 days) and 8.30am/5.30pm drop-offs/pick-ups are available at additional cost.

For children aged 6+.