Duration: 2 days | Location: Isle of Bute | Price: £130-£200

Learn about Spring time wild foods including leafy plants, roots and coastal forage through connection and sustainable wild food practices.

Overview:

This 2 day workshop introduces a variety of Spring time wild foods in the beautiful island landscapes of Bute. We will practice connection and reverence to place, identifying, collecting, processing and cooking with the food we find. We will use Tom’s kitchen in Kilchattan Bay for processing and cooking the foods we find.

Highlights:

• Learning to identify, gather and prepare wild foods for eating and preserving.
• An introduction to reverence and connection practices as part of all sustainable foraging practice, ideal for those who have some or little experience of foraging but are keen to develop your skills, knowledge and practice.
• A communal dinner on Saturday evening (included in the workshop fee), featuring some of the wild foods we have found
• Learning different ways to process foods for eating raw, drying, fermenting & cooking

You will need:

• See the What to Bring section for a basic overview of what to bring; plus…
• A selection of foraging bags (tote bags are ideal, but plastic is fine)
• A selection of jam jars with lids to take away some of the foods we process together
• A knife (small kitchen, pen knife or bushcraft)
• A packed lunch and water for each day

Workshop facilitator:

Tom Goodwin

I have had the fortune to learn with excellent teachers including Emily Fawcett and Charlie Loram of The Old Way Immersion, Lynx Vilden of Living Wild, and more recently Mo Wilde, when I joined her WildBiome Project where I lived off wild food only for one whole month in Spring 2025. This wild food month and a subsequent 10 day period the following Autumn, has helped me deepen my relationship to where I live on the Isle Of Bute.

Location & travel:

We will depart from and be based in Kilchattan Bay, which is in the South of the island.

Public transport: From Glasgow Central Station, you can take the train to Wemyss Bay which connects to the CalMac ferry (cars and foot passengers) from Wemyss Bay to Rothesay on Bute. There is a local bus service from Rothesay to Kingarth/ Kilchattan Bay.

By car: taking the M8 from Glasgow, head West through Port Glasgow and before Greenock, head towards Largs. Take the CalMac ferry from Wemyss Bay. You can buy a parking ticket from the station kiosk or bring the car over on the ferry.

Travel websites:
National Rail
CalMac Ferries
Local bus information

Accommodation & food:

Accommodation is self organised. A list of some local options will be provided on booking. Nightly prices start from £10

I recommend staying in Kilchattan Bay or Kingarth if you don’t have your own transportation.

Please bring a packed lunch and enough water each day. There are a couple of supermarkets in Rothesay to pick up supplies. There is a tea room and post office in Kilchattan Bay but we will not necessarily be close enough at lunch time to depend on it.

Dinner on Saturday evening (included in price) will include some of the foods we have gathered, as well as other foods Tom has prepared. This meal will be mostly vegan and gluten free, but may include optional shellfish depending on the tides/ what we find!

Schedule:

Saturday & Sunday 10am-5pm

Access:

Throughout the workshop, we’ll be using uneven gravel and earth tracks as well as going off track completely. We will hike between sites walking up to about 60 minutes at a time. The terrain is changeable with some steep hills, deep valleys and rocky coastlines.

There is free parking all along Kilchattan Bay.

There are public toilets located in Kilchattan Bay, but there are no facilities beyond this point.

Pricing & booking:

We use a tiered pricing structure to enable those with a range of circumstances to access this work. Please consider which tier is most appropriate for your income. We trust that you will read the tier descriptions below to ensure you pay a fair price for your circumstances.

Tier 1 – Please choose this tier if you frequently worry about money, are coping with debt, and struggle to pay monthly essential bills.
~ £130

Tier 2 – Please choose this tier if you have a fairly stable income, you need to take care with your spending, but can sometimes plan ahead or save for new purchases, holidays etc.
~ £160

Tier 3 – Please choose this tier if you are financially comfortable, can afford to save or invest money regularly, can afford new purchases, holidays etc.
~ £200

EARLY BIRD 10% discount HERE available until 30 March 2026
If you would like to pay in instalments and/or by bank transfer, please email kinshipworkshop@gmail.com

LIMITED PLACES AVAILABLE. Please note, the minimum sign up for this workshop to run is 5 people.

main colour photo description: in amongst a patch of white flowering wild garlic, a squatting pale-skinned, sun hat clad human collects a single leaf (image credit: @remedyfieldsglasgow)
facilitator colour photo description: Tom (a pale-skinned man with salt and pepper beard and orange hat) looks to camera with a long straight path running off to the distance, hawthorn trees to one side and cut field to the other