Let’s Go For a Walk!: Stories and Songs of Walking and Wandering
Our earliest humanoid ancestors stood up on their hind legs about 3 million years ago and we’ve been walking ever since. About 90,000 years ago we walked out of Africa and spread to every corner of the globe. Many millennia later we domesticated camels and horses so a few select members of society could ride but most of us continued on shanks’s pony until the late 19th century. Now we are urged to leave our cars and walk for the sake of our health and the environment. Walking has become a pleasure and a recreation rather than just a means of moving from one place to another.
In this programme Pete will tell a selection of stories in which walking is the key to everything else which happens. The stories come from Britain, Europe and North America and cover a range of time from the Ancient Greeks to yesterday. He will also include a few traditional songs. He is spoilt for choice with those because they all seem to start “As I walked out one mid-summer morning…” or “As I was a-walking one morning in May…”
It will be a programme including the light and the dark, the serious and the humorous and a bit of the supernatural.
Speaker Bio:
Pete Castle was born in Ashford, Kent in 1947 but has lived in Derbyshire for most of his adult life and considers that home. He trained as a teacher but in 1978 gave that up to pursue a career as a professional folk singer playing folk clubs and festivals, which he has continued to do ever since. A few years into that career he discovered storytelling and was soon described as “a storyteller who sings half his stories”. He has always been willing to restrict himself to either songs or stories if asked but much prefers to do a mixture of the two. He has worked with every type of audience imaginable in a wide variety of venues from clubs to festivals, schools, libraries, in historical sites and many more. He has taught and lectured for local authorities, the WEA, the Workers Music Association and so on. He is one of the few English folk artists to be invited to perform at the Smithsonian Folk Festival in Washington DC.
Since 1999 Pete has edited the storytelling magazine Facts & Fiction. In 2010 he was invited by The History Press to write Derbyshire Folk Tales for their county folk tales series. To his surprise he enjoyed being an author and followed it with Nottinghamshire Folk Tales (2012); Where Dragons Soar, animal folk tales (2016); and most recently Folk Tales of Song and Dance (2021)
Pete has always enjoyed walking and has led many story walks. The open air gives a tale a different ambiance. This programme will hope to bring that atmosphere back to your screen.
Curated and Hosted by
Dr. Amy Hale is an Atlanta-based anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, culture, women and Cornwall in various combinations. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of the forthcoming collection Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses from Palgrave Macmillan. Other writings can be found at her Medium site https://medium.com/@amyhale93 and her website http://www.amyhale.me.
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day