I'd started to think that I wasn't going to see anything quirky at the Festival this year - then I went into town and found a busker playing the Uilleann pipes next to Spar.
There don't seem to be quite so many people around as last year, though of course the mid week part of the Festival is always a bit quieter than the two weekends.
I also saw three red kites circling over the middle of town!
The River Wye has become the first river in Wales to receive a charter of rights to protect it.
There was a ceremony at the Warren and the charter has been endorsed by councils, campaigners and environmental groups along the length of the river. Councillor Elissa Swinglehurst of Herefordshire Council helped to create the charter, and other signatories are the Forest of Dean Council, Bannau Brycheiniog National Park and the Wye Valley National Landscape. Powys County Council and Monmouthshire Council were also represented at the ceremony.
The charter gives the river the following rights:
The right to flow and perform natural functions
The right to biodiversity
the right to be free from pollution
the right to be supported by a healthy catchment area
the right to regenerate
the right to representation
Ecologist Dr Louise Bodnor was appointed as the official Voice of the Wye in April 2025, and sits in meetings of Herefordshire County Council's Wye Catchment Nutrient Management Board, where she has the right to vote on behalf of the river.
The charter comes at a time when the river's health has been officially downgraded to "unfavourable - declining" by Natural England, and the court case brought by Leigh Day is in the High Court, seeking to hold Avara Foods and Welsh Water responsible for the increase in pollution in the river.
I got out of the Festival crowds the other day when a friend took me out to see a local castle I'd never visited before.
Old Castleton is perched on a promontory overlooking the water meadows of the River Wye, which meanders like mad across the valley there, and it's got three baileys! I had great fun scrambling up and down the banks and the motte. We also had to climb a couple of gates that had been put across the lane, possibly to stop sheep from the field just above from getting into the farmyard.
While looking at the map, I realised that we were also very close to Clock Mills. This is a private house, and it was once owned by Rafael Sabatini, the author of swashbuckling adventures early in the last century. Some of them were made into films starring Errol Flynn, and Sabatini invited Errol Flynn to stay at the house for a few weeks in the 1930s, for a bit of peace and quiet. So we did a little detour so I could see the house, just from the gateway.
I've been bimbling around town today, pretending to be a tourist.
Fair in the Square is on, with the usual vintage stalls, food stalls and live music. I treated myself to a falafel, which was very good, though the estimated wait time of ten minutes might have been a little optimistic!
In the Buttermarket and Cheesemarket there were more stalls, mostly of the crafty variety, and up at the Castle there was a craft fair on the lawn. They had live music, too, from a girl with a harp accompanied by a singer, guitarist and violinist.
More food trucks were in the Honesty bookshop, and down on Belmont Road the Secret Wine Bar was open, selling local Black Mountain wines (and some from a friend's vineyard near Presteigne).
The garden was open at Tinto House, along with small art gallery on one side and vintage French linens on the other. There's an art exhibition in the empty shop near Kilvert's, too.
And there are real owls at the Wobbly Owl shop this afternoon.
I'd booked a ticket to the very first event at Hay Festival - well, the very first for adults. The lady introducing the event said that there had been eight thousand kids from schools who had been bussed in for the day, and there would be a similar number of older children on the Friday.
They were trying a new format for talks. Normally, three guests would sit on stage, and be given prompting questions by the moderator, to get a discussion going. This time, though, after an introduction by Simon Armitage (who also read one of his poems, about a late library book), each guest got up to give a mini lecture, after which there was time for a few questions.
Tony Robinson said that he had been expecting the first type of event, but he gave a very good talk anyway about what history is, and how all the writers of history have had an agenda that you need to know something about before you take their account at face value.
Katherine Rundell talked about the importance of encouraging critical thinking in young people in a time of AI that pretty much agreed with everything you said and gave inaccurate information. She's done a lot of work in schools, so she's seen changes as pupils start to rely on ChatGPT and the like.
Dallas Campbell started by saying he'd been going to talk about one thing, but had been inspired by the previous speakers to talk about something completely different! He's interested in space archaeology, and talked about moon regolith and how it can be used to make all sorts of useful things, from cinder blocks to build Moon habitats for astronauts, to silicon chips. He had also brought along Neil Armstrong's space suit - well, not really Neil Armstrong's space suit ("that's behind bullet proof glass at the Smithsonian!") but the space suit that had been made for Ryan Gosling for a film where he played Neil Armstrong. Which is nearly as good!
This meant that I passed the BBC Marquee on my way home, just at the moment when several different breeds of sheep were lining up, with their handlers holding leashes, to process up the aisle to the stage!
Bizarrely, the music they walked in to was the House of the Rising Sun!
I have no idea which BBC programme this was for - it wasn't up on BBC Sounds when I went to look.
Before I dived into the first day of Hay Festival, I went up to the Castle to see the new exhibition there.
The exhibition is called Borderlands: From the Welsh Borders to Antarctica, and the most spectacular exhibits are the Antarctic tents decorated with multicoloured gloves, flags and sleeves, representing many different cultures.
There was also a film in the entrance hall about beating the bounds, with a laid hedge, local maps on cloth hung over the balustrade, and there are pictures and sculptures scattered around the Castle.
Outside in the grounds, Sally Matthews had just installed one of her animal sculptures:
Meanwhile in the Castle Yard, there's a small pop up art gallery - the exhibition there is called Fragile Wild, and the paintings are detailed panels of foliage and flowers.
The Borderlands exhibition runs until the 31st August.
