The inheritance no one ever told you that you had.

This programme of immersion over five weekends is the cornerstone of the Westcountry School of Myth. The next one will begin in the spring of 2021.

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.