Thank you for making the Gathering happen!

Well that was a lot of work…and worth every sec­ond! With Big Top now snooz­ing sound­ly in her stor­age lock­er, all the big pans washed up and kit vans scrubbed down, we want to extend huu­u­u­u­uge grat­i­tude to every­one who attend­ed this year’s Sum­mer Gath­er­ing. It’s a shame no-one came to the cam­ou­flag­ing work­shop, but oth­er than that, we reck­on it was a huge suc­cess!

There’s a few things still to mop up like return­ing lost prop­er­ty (drop an email to earthfirst.uk@proton.me if you’re miss­ing owt!) and col­lect­ing some extra dona­tions to help go towards some site vehi­cle tyres which got slight­ly slashed, pre­sum­ably by some dis­grun­tled evil landown­er types.

At some point in the gath­er­ing, one EF!er said “when we occu­py land it changes our rela­tion­ship to each oth­er.” and we were think­ing about this a lot while milling about with com­rades, new and old. Over and over again you find your­self real­is­ing how reliant we are on each oth­er and how resilient we can be togeth­er. The bor­ders and bina­ries melt away and new pos­si­bil­i­ties open up when we do things like this togeth­er.

It was so easy to for­get that we were even tres­pass­ing because it felt like our place in the moors was just so right. We chal­lenged the notion that humans don’t belong in wild places, that we can’t be trust­ed and don’t know how to treat the coun­try­side.

Humans belong to the land, not the oth­er way round!

See you all in a field this time next year! (or maybe anoth­er time of year cos its get­ting a bit warm for this)