Edible Seashore
Coastal gourmet foraging day out with John Wright (River Cottage) & Monica Wilde (Napiers the Herbalists)
with a wild gourmet lunch and treats!
Join us in May 2017, for a fascinating, fun and educational day with a gourmet wild banquet at lunch. We explore seashore foraging and investigate coastal land plants. learning which ones are safe to eat, which taste amazing and which have surprisingly valuable health benefits!
John Wright is a well-known forager from his appearances with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on the television series River Cottage. John also wrote four River Cottage Handbooks, No. 1. Mushrooms, No. 5. Edible Seashore, No. 7. Hedgerow. and No. 12, unashamedly called “Booze“,that indulges his passion for home brewing and for which Monica passed on a secret hangover remedy! In recent years he has published The Naming of the Shrew – an informative and amusing look at the naming of species, and Hedgerow – A Natural History of the Hedgerow: and ditches, dykes and dry stone walls. John has been studying fungi for over 50 years and foraging for over 40 years.
Despite all John’s courses on the Dorset coast being very popular, John has agreed to come up to Scotland yet again in May to run this special Seashore Foraging Day with me. This will be our fifth Edible Seashore day in Scotland as we have such a lovely time as well as our guests!
We forage while the tide goes out and explore the merse, beach and tidal zone. There is so much to taste and try on this beautiful part of the coast. We’ll go right out to the low tidal zone to gather pepper dulse, carragheen and other edible seaweeds. On the merse there is samphire, sea arrowgrass and sea plantain to try. In the woodland, dandelions, burdock, chickweed, medicinals like wild valerian and herbs like sweet woodruff for botanical infusions and cocktails! At around 2.30 we’ll have our foraged feast banquet and relax on the beach. Then perhaps bit more shore or woodland foraging, wrapping up for teatime.
We don’t know exactly what we will find on the day – we usually find around 80 species – but John can identify a wide range of edible species including crustacea (brown shrimp, common crab, lobster, prawn, shore crab, squat lobster, velvet swimming crab); molluscs (clams, cockle, dog whelk, limpet, mussel, oyster, razor clam, winkle); mushrooms; plants (alexanders, babbington’s orache, fennel, frosted orache, marsh samphire, perennial wall rocket, rock samphire, sea beet, sea buckthorn, sea holly, sea kale, sea purslane, sea rocket, spear-leaved orache, wild cabbage, wild thyme); and seaweed (carragheen, dulse, gut weed, laver, pepper dulse, sea lettuce, sugar kelp, kelp).
Date: Sunday 14 May 2017
Venue: East Lothian coast
Cost: £90 for an adult £20 for a child. This includes a large amount of food and drink!
Please book here if you would like to join us for what will be a brilliant, tasty, informative and usually hilarious, day out!
John will also be up again in Scotland in late September for our Fungi Foraging walks.
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