The inheritance no one ever told you that you had.
Five-Weekend Programme
The Wandering Court
The next five-weekend immersion (to be held in Devon, UK) is scheduled to begin September 2021, with the final weekend in March 2022. Bookings are not yet open due to the uncertainty of these Covid-19 times. When the situation is clearer, the course will be re-shaped as appropriate and bookings will open, or it will be delayed. If you would like to register your interest, please contact .
Those who don’t live in the UK might be interested in our longer four-night residential school.
The below is the description of the 2019/2020 course which has been left here for information, to give a broad flavour.
The Wandering Court programme is an immersion over five weekends and is the cornerstone of the Westcountry School of Myth. In the old bardic schools, home was less a building of stone, more a firm lintel of speech over one’s head, a flint-spark of sound, dry in the hand. We will follow such a mighty example, and take a rambling but purposeful route across the stories of Ireland, Siberia, the Caucasus Mountains, Scandinavia, and return, finally, to bed down in our beloved green seat of Dartmoor. Myth is our currency, our study, our passion – mythtelling the most effective vehicle for communicating its genius.
Along our way we find the necessity of vocation, the perennial need to wrestle death in order to live, the fragile currency of longing, the crafting of robust timbers of concentration to frame the flickering sails of momentary inspiration, how to honour the complexity of being supremely alone on the hill, and then how to elegantly step into the torch-lit fellowship of the feasting hall. We will live somewhere between the blue-green pines and the tavern’s fire.
Deep listening is required, a willingness to study, a commitment to entertaining more than the fluctuating polemics of our times. As a student, you will engage in storytelling from the very first weekend, not just as entertainment but as a different kind of activism.
All weekends include solo time in the afternoons, brooding and deciphering stories contained within the Devon landscape. The mythology of a landscape and the landscape of a mythology is a perennial theme for the year.
Where can myth lead us right now?
SEPTEMBER 6 · 8, 2019
The Commons of the Imagination
Weekend One
We will look at three infrequently recalled stories from the song lines of the European and Russian fairy tale tradition, and encounter, wrestle with and even sometimes tell, stories that seem both familiar and radically powerful in their disclosures.
Rather than endless choice, is there a chthonic compulsion to become something quite specific?
OCTOBER 18 · 20, 2019
Tuning Our Ear
Weekend Two
A crucial directive in myth is how to tune our ear to a great story. How do we listen? To trail it but not to trap it. In this second weekend we move far into the forests of the Seneca and the snowy north of the Copper Eskimo, to bear witness to a form of thought and image that dismantles much of what we may assume a cultural narrative is trying to corral
What is the difference between shelter and comfort?
December 6 · 8, 2019
Red Bead Speech
Weekend Three
What could it mean to speak with such primordial freshness that precious red beads fall from your mouth? We move into imagistic dimensions presided over by Yakut, Evenk and Nanai mythologies. We study the cultural and personal capacity to be imaginatively colonised, and the price required to break the pattern.
What are the stories the West tells itself in private?
February 7 · 9, 2020
The Love that Moves the Stars
Weekend Four
A three day epic: the Grail myth of Parzival. We begin our move back into the mythic underpinnings of what came to be regarded as Europe. Through this immense work – both literary and oral – we touch upon the schools of courtly love, the influence of Persia on the Arthurian Romances, and the deep questions we fail to ask in our own lives.
How does true generosity reveal its hand?
March 27 · 29, 2020
Praising the Acres
Weekend Five
In this final weekend, Martin tells three stories as give aways for the scholar to bring back to their communities for study and delight. Also in this final weekend, the scholars themselves tell (in small groups) a family or ancestral narrative that contains themes touched upon throughout the year.
How does a tired road become a song-line?
The Wandering Court
FEE: £1575 Bunk Bed in Shared Room · £1650 Shared Room
This five-weekend programme is an immersion into myth, a migratory voyage through the grandeur of language, mythos and place, led by mythologist Dr Martin Shaw. The fee covers all five weekends and includes accommodation, breakfast and dinner each weekend.
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