Sunday 3rd August 2025
10:00-15:00

Get hands-on at Ambleside Roman Fort on this special open day including stalls, walk and talks, demonstrations and reenactments.
The Armitt and the National Trust partner to bring you a day filled with activities all about the Romans. Connected with The Armitt’s 2025 exhibition “A Battle of Ambleside”, this event will be hosted at the fort and focused upon what may have been happening at the site during its lifetime. This is a great opportunity to get hands-on with history!
Throughout the day, there will be walk and talks, information stalls, hands-on displays, dress-up, reenactments and demonstrations facilitated by The Armitt and the National Trust, along with supporters the Trimontium Trust, Cumbria Amenity Trust Mining History Society (CATMHS) and students from Durham University.

Location:
Ambleside Roman Fort, Borrans Road, Ambleside, Cumbria, LA22 0EN, United Kingdom
The fort site is all grass so the terrain is rough and uneven. The stalls and activities will mostly be around the barn area where the land is slightly more flat. The ground will be more difficult for wheelchair access. Nearest parking area is Waterhead Car Park but there are also bus stops and the Windermere ferry close by so walking is only approximately 13-15 minutes and we encouraged using public transport where possible. Dogs welcome on leads.

7th August 2025
10:00-12:00
Tickets Adult £8.00 & Child £6.00

As we enjoy Midsummer days and nights with our children and grandchildren on holiday, First UK Laureate for storytelling, Taffy Thomas, will entertain young and old alike with a programme of stories from the fairies.

About the storyteller
Taffy has a repertoire of more than 300 stories, collected mainly from traditional oral sources, which he is happy to tell in almost any situation. This repertoire was built by meeting and working with virtually all the great traditional storytellers who were alive in Britain. He is now the most experienced English storyteller, having performed in many countries on four continents.

In October 2009, Taffy accepted the honorary position of first Laureate for Storytelling which ran for two years from January 2010 to January 2012.

8th August 2025
12:30-12500
Tickets: £12.00

Award winning sculptor Anthony D Padgett is hosting a walk and talk based around Kurt Schwitters’ Ambleside, the Armitt Museum (which holds original Schwitters’ works and Padgett’s bust of Schwitters), Schwitters’ gravestone and a couple of his favourite pubs.

About the artists
Kurt Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) spent the last few years of his life in Ambleside. He was a German artist, who became famous for his poem Anna Blume, worked in several genres and media, including Dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called “Merz Pictures”.

Padgett’s art practice looks at the history of art and literature. It includes spending a year being inspired to create artworks and texts around the lives of famous artists and poets. He then creates sculptures of those figures and sites these internationally. His subjects include Schwitters, Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Wilfred Owen and Humbert Wolfe.

9th August 2025
18:00-19:00
Tickets: £15.00

For several centuries, Hadrian’s Wall marked the northernmost frontier of the Roman Empire. However, this was a dynamic and fluctuating borderland region, which included episodes of war, but also collaboration, between the communities located south and north of the wall. This talk will discuss the evidence from Ambleside Roman Fort in the context of Rome’s presence in northern Britain, including new research on episodes of military confrontation in the Lake District and southwest Scotland.

About the speakers

John Reid

Initially intending to study classics at Glasgow University in 1974, with a view to a career in archaeology, John changed direction to study medicine. After attaining his basic medical degree (1979), he specialised in imaging of the heart and lungs, ultimately becoming the cardiac radiologist for Edin-burgh Royal Infirmary (1986-1996). During this period, John was also President of the Astronomical Society of Edinburgh.He went on to become the associate Medical Director of Borders General Hospital and the Specialty Adviser to the Chief Medical Officer of Scotland (1996-2016). John spent a year as an adviser to the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and a sabbatical year in Boston, Massachusetts, studying pulmonary embolism.

John returned to his primary interest in Scotland’s Roman Iron Age in 2012. He has been the chairman of the Trimontium Trust – a Roman History Society – in the Scottish Borders for nearly thirty years.At Trimontium, they have an active education, research and outreach programme and also run a small award-winning independent museum based in the Ormiston Institute in Melrose. Their £1.5m project to renovate and extend the museum was completed in 2021. The trust has also just completed a second project to build a £1.1m community archaeology centre.

John has a specialist interest in the ballistic capabilities of the Imperial Roman Army. He devised and co-led (with Andrew Nicholson) the investigations at the Roman siege site of Burns-wark Hill in Dumfriesshire for four years (2014-17).John’s current interests include collaboration with Prof. Manuel Fernandez-Götz (Oxford University) on the probable assault on the Roman fort at Ambleside.2023 saw the publication of John’s first book, ‘The Eagle and the Bear: A New History of Roman Scot-land’ (2023 – Birlinn, Edinburgh). He was also awarded an MBE in King Charles’s Birthday Honours for services to culture and heritage (2023).

Manuel Fernández-Götz

Manuel Fernández-Götz is Professor of Later European Prehistory at the University of Oxford. Previously, he was Abercromby Professor at the University of Edinburgh, where he also served as Head of the Archaeology Department. He continues to be associated with the University of Edinburgh as Honorary Professor.

His main research areas are late prehistoric and Roman societies, specialising in topics such as the archaeology of early cities, migrations, and battlefields. Manuel has carried out fieldwork in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Croatia, and authored over 250 publications. His research has been recognised by various distinctions and awards, including the Philip Leverhulme Prize and the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Thomas Reid Medal in Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. From 2021-25 he was PI of the Leverhulme Trust-funded project “Beyond Walls: Reassessing Iron Age and Roman Encounters in Northern Britain”.

He has been a board member of the European Association of Archaeologists and the Young Academy of Europe. His memberships and fellowships include, among others, the Academia Europaea, the Young Academy of Scotland, and the Societies of Antiquaries of Scotland and London. He is currently Trustee of National Museums Scotland.

13th August 2025
14:00-15:30
Tickets: £15.00

The Grasmere Dialect Plays, written and produced by Eleanor Rawnsley (neé Simpson), second wife of Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley (co-founder of the National Trust) are a remarkable part of Cumbrian history.

Staged in the Grasmere Village Hall between 1905 and 1937, the plays were a national – and international – sensation at the time.

Performed by Grasmere villagers in local (Westmorland) dialect, they have entertaining and improbable plots, featuring thwarted lovers, competing suitors and meddling relatives – all with happy endings.

The plays were never published: a few printed scripts still survive, together with some photographs and reviews of performances, held at the Wordsworth Trust and the Armitt Museum.

About the speaker

Sue Wilkinson is a committee member of the Lakeland Dialect Society, and graduated (with Distinction) from the University of Cumbria’s MA ‘Literature, Romanticism and the English Lake District’ in 2024. She’s made three podcasts about the Grasmere Dialect Plays, and curated the Armitt’s ‘Book of the Season’ in early 2025: the 1906 Grasmere Dialect Play “Pace Eggin’ Time”..

26th August 2025
14:00-15:30
Tickets: £6.00

Between 5500 and 5000 years ago, people were seeking stone for axe blades across Europe. From the Italian Alps to Shetland, the rocks they sought had immense value. But not just because they could then fell trees with them, in an age known to us now as the ‘Neolithic’ – or ‘New Stone Age’ – an age before metal technology.

The biggest Neolithic stone axe blade production sites in the UK and Ireland are those in the central fells of the Lake District. Internationally significant, sites revealed here show that thousands of blades were created, the majority from sites on Pike o’Stickle in Langdale, and high on Scafell Pike. The changes in the Neolithic set a course that led to the Lake District’s inscription as a World Heritage Site.

This talk explores how and why this happened, featuring the latest archaeological discoveries from Lakeland’s highest mountains.

About the speaker

Steve Dickinson graduated in archaeology from the University of Durham, and has gone on to direct many excavations and surveys in the Lake District. His current projects include finding evidence for a new set of Viking Age sites in West Cumbria, and revealing evidence for a huge array of Neolithic ritual sites in SW Cumbria. He is a member of the European Association of Archaeologists, and of the Prehistoric Society.

13th September 2025
15:00-16:30
Ticket – Adult £8:00 – Child £6:00

Local author Deborah Lyon talks about her children’s book set in second century Ambleside. Join her for an action-packed reading travelling back in time, followed by a Q&A looking at what it was like to be a Roman soldier in ancient Britannia during the reign of Emperor Hadrian.

About the author
Deborah Lyon lives on the shores of Windermere with her large, blended family, several naughty dogs, two squeaky guinea pig brothers and a host of tropical fish. She was born in Manchester, worked in London for many years and moved to the Lake District when her children were little. She now spends her time studying local history and weaving magical stories around Cumbria’s heritage and folklore.

Timewaif & The Roman Road is her first children’s novel and opens The Timewaif Chronicles, a series of time-travelling adventures set across different periods of Lake District history.

Deborah has a degree in French & English Literature from the University of Oxford and a Master’s in Creative Writing from Lancaster University.

Reviews
“Deborah Lyon is a born writer and this is an absolutely wonderful book. I loved its Cumbrian setting, and got completely involved not just in the time-travelling adventure but above all in the human stories: I found myself caring hugely about the characters, totally exhilarated and at times moved to tears. I’ve given a copy to every 8-15-year old I know, I urge everyone else to read it too, and I can’t wait for the next in the series.”

Tim Robertson Former Director of the Royal Society of Literature Trustee of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmerewrights”

30th September 2025
14:00-15:30
Ticket – £6:00

This talk will explore the development of children’s literature and, in particular, the ‘holiday adventure’ genre within the context of the Lake District – a region which in 2017 was granted UNESCO World Heritage status and deemed an internationally significant Cultural Landscape. While the UNESCO nomination document makes clear the vital role of literature in shaping the way we think about and respond to this place, there is little reference to authors of children’s literature, whose texts have greatly influenced subsequent visitor engagement with the Lakes. Given the formative influence of children’s literature and the fact that these writers negotiate with key ideas developed by Wordsworth, in which children learn through engagement with Lakeland landscapes, this seems a surprising omission.

This talk considers the importance of these texts for children and in particular the way in which they help us perceive the region to be an evolving ‘cultural Landscape’.

About the speaker
Dr Penny Bradshaw is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Cumbria and programme Leader for the University’s MA Literature, Romanticism, and the English Lake District, which includes a module on children’s literature. Penny specialises in and publishes on regional literary contexts, and her latest project is An A-Z of Beatrix Potter, which is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic.

Wednesday 12th November 2025
14:00-16:00
Tickets: £15.00

Meg has worked in many museums and galleries in the North West, and has always been fascinated by the magical objects they contain. She has also admired the fantastic illustrations of people who discovered and investigated many of these finds.

In this archaeology themed workshop, we will be drawing from Roman artefacts kept in The Armitt’s collection, inspired by some of the illustrations currently on display. This is a beginner level workshop suitable for those who with little to no drawing experience, as well as those who has some drawing experience and fancy trying something new!

About the artist

Meg Bowyer is an Artist from Cumbria, currently living in the South Lakes. Her background is in drawing and sculpture, and she undertook a BA Fine Arts at Lancaster University, and Masters in Drawing at Paris College of Art. Most of Meg’s work looks at relationships between Cumbrian traditions, industries, and materials. She has ran workshops in drawing, creative writing, and textile sculpture, through Assembly Arts in Lancaster, and is currently undertaking a archival residency program with Signal Film & Media in Barrow.