Landscape as archive - writing retreat

Led by award-winning poet JLM Morton, this retreat, from Friday to Monday invites you to explore how poetry can open up a deeper connection to place.

The invitation:

A three night retreat where we’ll explore landscape as archive, using poetry to read the traces held in pond, marsh, meadow and woodland. Through field notes, sensory mapping and archival thinking, you’ll craft poems that engage deeply with site, memory and the interconnected living world, honouring what the land remembers.

This retreat offers spaciousness, companionship and a chance to write with the textures of Somerset beneath your feet.

Through guided workshops, close observation and time outdoors, we’ll deepen our attention to place and explore what the land reveals, records and remembers.

By the end of the weekend, you will have deepened your ability to read the land as a living archive, developed new poems, and renewed your creative energy. You’ll leave with a deeper sense of how poetry can shape the way you encounter place and with writing rooted in the textures, histories and quiet intelligences of Oakhill Ponds.

There will also be opportunities for swimming, sauna and fireside gathering.

What’s included:

• three nights’ accommodation

• all meals: local, seasonal and vegetarian

• poetry workshops with JLM Morton

• celebratory supper with a guest author

• shared sauna sessions

• swimming in spring-fed ponds

• time to explore the landscape

• a coffee station in each room with seasonal flowers, towels and toiletries

• wi-fi across the site

The accommodation:

• shepherd’s huts

• Lotus Belle tents

• spacious rooms in The Beeches retreat house

• Upper Beeches apartment

Retreat numbers are intentionally small to keep the atmosphere spacious and unhurried

Writing spaces:

• each room has a desk and writing station, or access to a sheltered pavilion with wood-burner

• further writing stations are scattered across the 25-acre site

• the Walled Garden yurt

• the Horse Lorry Library

• the library in The Beeches

• fireside rooms in The Beeches for cooler hours

Meet your retreat leader:

JLM Morton is a poet, writer and teacher whose work explores place, memory and the living world. Her poetry has featured on BBC 6 Music and appeared in leading journals and broadcasts. Her debut poetry collection, Red Handed (Broken Sleep Books, 2024), was highly commended in the Forward Prizes and named a Poetry Society Book of the Year.

She teaches for Poetry School, the Poetry Society and Women Poets Network and is the founding director of Dialect Writers Collective. Her second poetry collection, Borrowed Ground, is forthcoming in August 2026, with her debut nonfiction to follow in 2027.

Link to bio