A POPULAR festival dedicated to the daffodil will bloom again later this month, for the first time since 2019.

The Kempley Daffodil weekend takes place on Saturday to Sunday, March 19-20, with walks, talks, exhibitions, music and refreshments, celebrating the wild spring flower and the days when hundreds of flower sellers descended from London to pick them.

Last year, BBC Countryfile profiled The Golden Triangle of Kempley, Dymock and Oxenhall on the Herefordshire and Gloucestershire border, immortalised by the Dymock Poets who walked the local trails a century ago.

But while its traditional free festival events were put on hold last year, the area can now finally celebrate again.

Spokesman Martin Brocklehurst said: “We are ready to welcome visitors for the first time since spring 2019, and public events to celebrate the glorious wild daffodils in the Golden Triangle are back on in Kempley and Dymock.

“A grant of £7,800 from Gloucestershire Council has made this year’s events possible, with support for staff to help with the organisation, to fund new corporate signage for the event, free ‘Daff and Ride’ minibus trips, organised walks and the usual scrumptious locally made food and drink.”

He added that Kempley, six miles from Ross-on-Wye, has now adopted a new corporate-consistent branding across all it local organisations including the village hall, the parish council and other local groups, highlighting its position at the heart of wild daffodil country as celebrated by poets through the ages.

“We are delighted to once again be welcoming visitors from near and far to enjoy daffodil teas, bacon butties, guided walks, the daff-and-ride bus and – last but not least – the glorious carpet of wild daffodils “fluttering and dancing in the breeze” and proudly announcing with their golden trumpets the arrival of spring in the Golden Triangle,” said Martin.

There will be hot drinks and guided walks from the Arts and Crafts-style St Edward’s Church from 9.30am on both days, plus exhibitions and events at St Mary’s Norman Church - famous for its frescoes - plus food and drink during the day at the village hall, while a ‘Market to your Door’ specialising in local food and produce will operate on Saturday morning.

The festival will also highlight climate change, with a dozen parishes in the Golden Triangle endorsing a ‘Biodiversity Resolution’ to promote and co-operate on the management of the countryside within the special landscape.

“We are backing this up with action at both an individual and community level,” added Martin. “We hope you will see some of these activities as you walk around our community and we thought it would be fun to give you a quiz to keep the kids busy and get you looking for signs of change.”

Visitors will also be encouraged to visit the Centenary Glade project, 300m from the Forestry England car park in Queens Wood, which is benefitting wildlife and ensuring that the wild daffodils can expand and develop in the Golden Triangle.

A joint effort between Forestry England and the Dymock Forest Rural Action Group (DyFRA), the project has seen local people and volunteers plant more than 600 trees and shrubs to transform the site into an area of wild plants to help bees, butterflies and other insects, while local schools also planted 100 wild service trees in a secret spiral maze, with plants grown from the seeds of five conserved mature specimens.

Although lockdown prevented last year’s event, the Golden Triangle was celebrated on national TV when Forestry England’s Assistant Ecologist Kate Wollen took Countryfile’s Ellie Harrison to Shaw Common, described as the ‘best hotspot for native daffodils in the UK’.

They spoke about the importance of access to the countryside during lockdown and the threat of climate change and the loss of pollinating insects to ancient woodlands.

Local people at St Mary’s Church in Kempley also told her about a social history project of memories and the historic daffodil trade, and the GWR tourist Daffodil Line railway which ceased operating in 1964.

Full details of the festival are available from local outlets and on the Kempley Daffodil Weekend website www.daffs.org.uk.