After the coffee break, and opportunity for retail therapy, Carolyn Hillyer took the stage.
Where Andy Letcher's talk had been quite chatty and informal, this was more of a studied performance. She began by saying that she had been waiting impatiently to get old enough to write her new book, Book of Hag - Travels towards Ancientness! She performed fragments of the book, including a folk tale style story about an old woman and bear, which was very funny when they came to discuss what sort of folk tale the old woman was in. Was it, perhaps, one in which she and the bear had sex and created a race of half human half bears? The bear replied that this would be unlikely, since the bear was also female.
Later, she even got the audience chanting in Proto-Celtic to the beat of a drum.
It was a performance to experience, rather than take notes about.
In the evening, she provided the musical entertainment, but by that time we were all too tired (and the rain was too horizontal) for any of us to want to climb back up the hill from the chalet.
According to the programme, she lives at a farm on Dartmoor, where she's built a Neolithic-style round house, and is known as a musician, drum maker and writer.
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