Our session leaders are experienced SEND professionals, and our camps aim to give every child the opportunity to spend quality time in nature. We aim to give as many children as we can a wonderful experience that they will remember for the rest of their lives.

Available Dates:

19th-22nd August (7-16 years)

Our four day programmes generally run as follows:

• Monday (10am-3pm): Meeting with the children at Treacle Valley for some fun outdoor games, and some sensory activities to switch on our senses and learn about some of the creatures we might find in the outdoors. Lunch is our special bannock bread, cooked by the children over the campfire!
• Tuesday (10am-3pm): Exploring the woods and taking part part in environmental activities and games, with some creative and artistic activities thrown in as the day goes on. Today is pancake day, don’t miss the spectacle of Rich attempting to toss a pancake without either burning it or flipping it into the fire.
• Wednesday/Thursday (5pm-midday, overnight camp): What an experience! Sunset games, fireside storytelling, a walk in the woods at night, marshmallows, breakfast around the campfire. For many children this is their first experience of camping and being away from home and they are always so excited and happy to join us. Children are accommodated in our giant bell tents and will only need minimal camping equipment – a sleeping bag and a torch – everything else is provided.

The format for young people aged 11-16 is similar but the activities are more mature and have a bushcraft/conservation focus. We generally include activities such as firefighting, knife and axe work and tracking with this age group.

The full programme costs £120 per child for the full four days. We can offer sibling discounts if you are booking places for more than one child. Our holiday clubs run at a small loss each year and we do not currently receive any external funding to provide them, but we want to be able to offer these experiences to as many children as possible. We understand that times are tough for lots of families, so if you would like your child to join our Treacle Valley Adventures but cost is an issue, then please let us know and although we can’t promise we will see what we can do.

For more information, please contact Rich at rich@taleblazers.org.uk or to book a place please complete the Microsoft Form below.

We will run alternate weeks at our bases at Treacle Valley and at Cockington with a different focus each week. At Cockington we will run an art-based programme, while our Treacle Valley sessions will be focused on traditional crafts and conservation. We want to create friendly and welcoming spaces where you can come and meet other families of children with SEND, learn some new skills, be inspired and have some fun.

Children are very welcome to attend and depending on their age and numbers we may provide alternative activities for them so that parents can relax and enjoy the sessions.

To sign up, please complete our Microsoft Form by clicking here!

The students really enjoyed exploring their senses in the gardens, looking around the lawns and greenhouses for herbs and then smelling and soaking them to make soapy suds. It was a beautiful sunny day, so it was a prime opportunity to enjoy the sun, let loose, and follow their curiousity — usually, this led them to the Cactus room!

Many of the students had not visited Torre Abbey at all before, so there was plenty to discover in the museum. The students carefully explored their surroundings so that they could gather clues for their riddle trail. Along the way we found an Olympic torch, a ballroom, and even a rhino (albeit a statue of a rhino). We’re really lucky to have such a rich historic monument here in the heart of the Bay.

The festival was a great success as families gathered around to make their mark on history and join in the festivities. Everyone enjoyed making their contribution to the mosaic and the festival was a success, with lots of people learning about Cullompton’s Roman history through talks, pottery making, walks, demonstrations and crafts, hosted by Creative Cullompton. The festival celebrated not only Roman Cullompton, but the recent archeological digs at the Hill Fort. 

It was amazing to see everyone’s individual contributions come together to create a beautiful tree!

It’s not every day that you get to make your own piece of history.

Lonely keeper of the gold

In the tumbled cleave.

A bird out of Merlin’s ear.

One of the things I love about Taleblazers is that I get to spend most of my working week outdoors, exploring the coast and moors with our young people. Together we go to a whole variety of places, moorland, beach and woodland, and one of our students’ favourite places is Stover. It’s not the wildest of places but there’s always something to see: tufted ducks diving, dragonflies buzzing over the marsh, finches squabbling at the bird feeder. We always love to spend a few hours there.

Dotted around the park, and linked together by a trail that weaves around the woods, are some of Ted Hughes poems. They are printed on shiny plaques attached to big wooden posts, and are usually sited in an appropriate environment reflecting the poem. You can sit by the water and reflect on To Paint A Water Lily, or read Roe-Deer deep in the woods. Hughes was born in Yorkshire but is closely associated with Devon, and his poems are perfect for this setting. It can feel very calming to sit by one of his poems and unpick the words and phrases, immersing yourself in each line. His work often needs a little unpicking, but Hughes will repay an investment of time many times over.

My favourite work of Hughes’s is A Cormorant, and on the trail the poem is sited at a spot where you can often look across the lake and see one drying its wings high up in a tree (for all their otherwise perfect adaptation, cormorants do not have waterproof wings and need to dry them off after diving). A Cormorant is a masterpiece, contrasting Hughes as an ‘optimistic, awkward, infatuated’ fisherman with a cormorant ‘dissolving fish naturally’. Hughes is cumbersome, overloaded with gear, entirely unsuited to the task of catching fish, while the cormorant is a sleek marvel, perfect for the task. I love the way Hughes even uses clunky language and lumpy phrases to describe himself, while when describing the words spill out in a wonderful flow. I thoroughly recommend you go and find the poem by the lake and take some time to digest it, and if you are incredibly lucky you may even find you have a cormorant for company.

I hope you enjoy it half as much as I do.

Here before me, snake-head.
My waders weigh seven pounds.

My Barbour jacket, mainly necessary
For its pockets, is proof

Against the sky at my back. My bag
Sags with lures and hunter’s medicine enough

For a year in the Pleistocene.
My hat, of use only

If this May relapses into March,
Embarrasses me, and my net, long as myself,

Optimistic, awkward, infatuated
With every twig-snag and fence-barb

Will slowly ruin the day.  I paddle
Precariously on slimed shale,

And infiltrate twenty yards
Of gluey and magnetized spider-gleam

Into the elbowing dense jostle-traffic
Of the river’s tunnel, and pray

With futuristic, archaic under-breath
So that some fish, telepathically overpowered,

Will attach its incomprehension
To the bauble I offer to space in general.

The cormorant eyes me, beak uptilted,
Body-snake low — sea-serpentish.

He’s thinking: “Will that stump
Stay a stump just while I dive?” He dives.

He sheds everything from his tail end
Except fish-action, becomes fish,

Disappears from bird,
Dissolving himself

Into fish, so dissolving fish naturally
Into himself. Re-emerges, gorged,

Himself as he was, and escapes me.
Leaves me high and dry in my space-armour,

A deep-sea diver in two inches of water.

‘A Cormorant’, by Ted Hughes

See also: the Ted Hughes Poetry Trail on the Devon County Council website (external link).

The poem tells the story of a warning bell that was placed on Inchcape, a notorious hidden rock that posed a great danger to sailors in Scottish waters. The bell would ring to warn sailors of danger but was removed by a sea pirate. The bell removed, the not-so-savvy sea pirate later perished upon the rock, with his ship and his goods to boot

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I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

Today is John Muir Day, marking Muir’s 184th birthday and commemorating his life and the Trust and Award set up in his name. Muir is known as the ‘father of national parks’ and is famous for his explorations of the American wilderness, having moved to America with his family at the age of 11 and spent most of the rest of his life exploring and writing about it. The story of Muir’s life is inspirational and his writings still carry a freshness about them, vivid descriptions that still have the power to pull you into the landscape. There is a lot of excellent writing about Muir’s life, not least in the hundreds or articles and books he produced in his life, so in this post I will talk about the John Muir Award and how Taleblazers are involved.

The John Muir Award is an open award that anyone can take part in, centred around discovering, protecting and celebrating wild places. It has three levels – Discovery, Explorer and Conserver – each of which requires a greater depth of commitment and immersion in the natural environment. To achieve the award, you have to work towards four challenges: Discover, Explore, Conserve and Share. The award is quite open and can be adapted easily to fit individual needs, so it fits our 1-1 programmes really well. It gives a reason to be out and about in wild places and provides a context for the activities we do.

Kev and I ran our first John Muir Award many years ago, working with Bovey Tracey Guides at Broadhempston to complete the Discovery Award. We had a lot of fun running it and when we started Taleblazers one of the first things we did was to put together a John Muir programme to offer to individuals and schools. It suits our blend of environmental education and storytelling incredibly well, and as adaptable leaders we have a lot of fun delivering it.

I love the John Muir Award so much that I decided to work towards the Conserver level myself. There are a lot of places I love, but I decided to focus my award at Hembury Woods just outside Buckfast. The area has a fascinating history, with a Norman castle sitting on top of the earthworks of a hillfort, and a silver mine in the valley below. But it’s the natural beauty of the woods, sitting on the western wide of a twist of the river Dart, that I get most excited about. The wood is managed so there are areas of new growth and there is often some thinning taking place, but down by the river the woods are wonderful. Old oak and beech trees sit side by side on the river bank, watching the water tumble over short rapids and fan into quiet swimming spots. Birdsong is everywhere, wood ants busy themselves as only ant colonies can, and underfoot there are bluebells and bilberries.

I realised early on that there is so much I don’t know, so as part of my award I’ve been working on my wood lore. With the help of Steve from Basic Bushcraft I’ve been working on my tree identification, and although I’m no expert yet I can at least spot hazel, alder, larch, western hemlock and others. On each visit I spot a new mushroom or flower that I rush home to identify. It’s a fascinating and immersive process, knowledge gained by exploration and experience gradually getting to know every part of the wood. Every day brings new questions, and excitement in the search for answers.

However, my journey hasn’t just been one of learning. Influenced by the young people I have been working with as well as the environment, I have discovered an enjoyment of more creative activities: photography, sketching, writing, painting. I have sat quietly by the river with my students or by myself and just allowed time to pass. The benefits to my own mental health have been profound. Doing the John Muir Award has reminded me to take time out in nature myself, to open up to creativity and sometimes to just let the world go by.

I still have more to do before I finish. I haven’t visited the wood at dusk or dawn yet, looked for bats and kingfishers. I’d like to set up some NPMS squares to find out what plants live in different areas of the site and to track their abundance over the coming months and years. And I feel ready to start the Share phase of my award in greater earnest. This blog has been part of that process but, as a reward for getting to the end of it, I’d like to invite you to share it with me. On Saturday 30th April I will be leading an early morning walk at Hembury Woods. I’d like to show you around the woods and tell you the story of the hillfort and mine, introduce you to the river and some of the species that live on its banks. There is no charge, but I would appreciate donations to the John Muir Trust if you feel able to do so.

If you would like to come, booking is essential – please check the Eventbrite page for ticket availability.

Let me start by making this very clear: I do not love to write. Well, at least not mechanically.  

Being a comorbid dyspraxic has meant my life has been a constant struggle to get down the words in my head and transfer them to a physical medium, I cannot touch-type, my handwriting is almost illegible, 98% of it in block capitals and contains more misspelt words than you would expect from a gentleman with my erudition and vocabulary – sometimes the frustration and embarrassment of my condition is such that it will styme my efforts from the start and I regularly go months without writing at all. 

However, occasionally the mood will take me (or a deadline approaches and I find I can procrastinate no longer) and I pick up a Red and Black A4 notebook, one of my beloved Parker Jotters (black ink, never blue) and start scribbling down my nonsense. 

Whether it’s a ballad, a workshop plan, RPG scenario, a letter to a friend or just something completely silly, it all goes into my notebooks, some of it eventually gets transferred to a Word .doc but not much – mostly it stays in those A4 books, they get filled and filed into the bottom of my wardrobe and now at 45 years of age I have a small tower of them, 30 or more years of stories, ideas, poems, doodles and observations. 

Now I’m here writing my first Blog post.  

Blogging is one of those things that simply hasn’t ever appealed – the idea that strangers might enjoy reading my writing or be interested in what I have to say is laughable to me, having said that I hope someone does enjoy the effort – you should know that it took a lot longer than you’d imagine. Here I go… 

Autumn has well and truly descended upon us and with it all the colors, smells and traditions of the season. Reluctantly I return my shorts to the back of the wardrobe and pull forward the thicker, warmer clothes for Winter. Yet I am not miserable because with the colder weather comes Halloween, Bonfire Night and off in the distance there is the Winter Solstice and Christmas soon to come.   

As much as I love summer, this time of the year is my favourite, I have incredibly fond memories of bonfire nights at the Marshal’s family home as a child (I was the only one of my peers deemed sensible enough to light some of the fireworks) and Halloween has, at least in more recent years, been my preferred holiday. I enjoy the cold and crisp evenings and welcome the opportunity to sit out under a clear sky next to a flickering fire and tell ghost stories. 

I vividly remember the first ghost story I was told – it is a classic from the 80’s – Young lovers in their car drive into the woods. During the evening a thick mist descends, and the radio reports the recent escape of a brutal manic from an asylum in the local area. At one point the boyfriend has to leave the car, he insists his young lady opens the car door only when he knocks on the roof three times. Much later and with the woman in a state of high anxiety she is relieved to hear a knock on the roof and is about to open the door when the knock continues, well past three consecutive times, the knocking carries on all night and all through the night she remains huddled in terror within the automobile. Until finally, daylight arrives, the women gathers her courage and exits the vehicle…to find the severed head of her beau bouncing atop the car, suspended by a rope of intestines hung from a tree above. 

Hardly a subtle psychological thriller but I remember the shiver it gave me and the way it stayed with me long after the tale was told. I have enjoyed ghost stories ever since. 

So when Kate at Torre Abbey asked if Taleblazers wanted to put on a guided tour of the Abbey, focusing on the more spooky and supernatural stories that have grown up around the site we jumped at the chance and “The Terrible Tales of Torre Abbey” was born (Cue flash of lightning and roll of thunder). 

The remit: A 45 minute tour around the site for 2 nights tours, 3 tours per night, spooky but family friendly. 

Kate and Matt provided me with a whole heap of information including accounts of ghostly goings on stretching back through the Abbey’s 800-year history. There were regular sightings of apparitions, reports of poltergeist activity, horrible tales from the past and a few observations and feelings claimed to have been experienced by psychics on the occasions where they were allowed to survey the site. 

A lot of the information was very useful, I immediately saw potential in several of the accounts and fables but I found the psychic stuff left me cold – It might come as something of a surprise to hear that I am a sceptic…I don’t really believe in an afterlife, an immortal soul or the notion that the dead can communicate with the living. However, I am fascinated by the paranormal and further to that I enjoy stories, folk tales and mythology from all around the world – many of these things require you to suspend your disbelief and just roll with it for the sake of the story, something I am more than happy to do. 

I decided I wanted to include as much as I could that would complement the activities we already do with the fine folks at Torre Abbey, so I made sure I wrote sections that covered the Spanish Armada of 1558 and the Siege of the Abbey in 1351 – the two workshops we currently have available running at the site – and linked those into the ghost sightings. There was a wonderfully grisly tale of a fellow called William Anning who had his leg amputated in the Cary dining room, some various other reports of ethereal figures and I ended the tour in the Undercroft with a straight up Ghost Story that I wrote many years ago called “Blood and Gold” It has no basis in fact nor does it contain anything remotely historically accurate but it’s a great yarn in my opinion and well tested as I have been telling it for more than 15 years. 

I heartily enjoyed the two nights and the event bought in some lovely people (many who dressed up for extra spookiness) – we have some email addresses and hope to send out a little questionnaire later this month, all in all a great success, many thanks to the Torre Abbey crew and everyone who attended – I hope we can do it again next year, bigger and even scarier. 

What is Trails Day you may wonder? Well, in 1968 American president Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Trails Act into law which established a network of trails for people to use. Trails Day celebrates the explored and the unexplored by getting out into nature to discover and to rediscover. This could be by walking, hiking, cycling or on a horse back. For example, we have the South West Coast Path which one could follow to discover hidden gems and beautiful views.

Taleblazers is a CIC which focus children and young people as well as the communities of Dartmoor and south Devon, we are passionate about storytelling and the outdoors. In April, we were awarded our first grant from the Torbay Small Grants Lottery Fund for our project the Chelston Heritage Map. Our own trail which you could walk. We have been researching places in Chelston to feature on the map, we have drawn multiple versions and we have engaged the community of Chelston to have their say on which historical places of Chelston to include. We are soon to launch this project so stay tuned!

#Trailsday #Taleblazers #Torbay #SouthWest #Devon #Outdoor #Nature #TorbayCouncil #TorbaySmallGrantsLotteryFund