Dear Friends,
There is good and bad news.
The bad news is that we are no longer holding this year’s Weird
Weekend in Woolsery. The good news, is that we have found another venue for this year's event, and hopefully for many years to come: The
Small School in Hartland.
I have had a lot of emails and telephone calls about the
decisions by the Woolsery Community Hall Committee which have led to our
leaving. A lot of people appear to be quite angry about what has happened. We
would like to say, that whilst we don’t agree with their decisions, they were
quite within their rights to make them, and we respect that right. We are sad
to move the event away from Woolsery, but by doing so we are supporting the
Small School in Hartland even more, and this was – after all – the thing which
started off all the problems with the Community Centre in the first place.
From the Small
School website:
“The Small School
was founded in 1982 by Satish Kumar and other parents living in an
isolated rural community in an economically-deprived area of South West
England. The nearest state secondary school, with almost 2,000
students, was 13 miles away, involving 2 hours travelling a day by bus.
This pioneering group, most of whose children had been educated in small
village primary schools, wished to show that secondary education, too, could be
modelled on the family, rather than the factory, and based in the local
community.
The school is in the centre of Hartland in
the old church hall and at the heart of the community At the rear of the school
we have a vegetable garden that is maintained by the students and the food
produced is used for the cooked lunches. As a school we aspire to a greener
future and we are constantly looking at ways to be more environmentally
friendly. As a school we recycle and source all our produce (if it's not
already growing in the garden) from the local farm shop in Hartland. By doing
this we are not only supporting local businesses but also cutting down on food
miles.
The school serves vegetarian food
and other dietary requirements are also catered for. A different parent
volunteers to cook the lunch each day and a rota of students help out in the kitchen
too. All students attend a Level 2 Food Safety course in order to prepare for
the kitchen work. Students also take responsibility for the cleaning of the
buildings at the end of the day”.
The
Small
School is not as large as
the Woolsery Community Centre, but we believe that there is plenty of room for
our needs. There will be a bar and a restaurant, and profits from both will go
to the School itself. However, because we are sad to be leaving Woolsery, we
shall be making our customary donation to Woolsery charities.
This is a new beginning, and we hope that in future years
the event will grow and that we shall be able to involve our friends across
North Devon and make this a truly community event which shall carry on for
years.
There will be changes, but as any ecologist will tell you,
without change, systems go stagnant, and I would hate that to happen to
something to which I have given my heart and soul over the past fifteen years.
We shall be running a shuttle service for anyone who is
booked into a Woolsery B&B who doesn’t have their own transport, and will
be uploading a list of accommodation and campsites in Hartland over the next
few days…
Onwards and Upwards
Jon Downes
The hunt for British Big Cats attracts far more newspaper-column inches than any other cryptozoological subject. 
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