We have been walking together on the first Friday of each month since 2004.
We’re pleased that walkers are able join us from a wide number of locations, including Scotland, Wales, Sweden, Georgia, Greece, USA and Australia.
Our walks are designed so that they can be joined where ever you happen to be either remotely, or in person at various locations throughout Gloucestershire in the UK.
We try to synchronise our walks so that everyone begins their own walk together.
If you walk together with us in rural Gloucestershire, most walks are around 5-7 km with a mixture of terrain that can vary between muddy tracks on hillside to flat and grassy river banks.
Walkers come from a variety of different disciplines and include artists and non-artists. Although many who join us are painters, printmakers and photographers others are poets, naturalists, writers, film makers, sound recordists, musicians or psychogeographers
Walks are generally ‘themed’ or ‘scripted’ and often a vehicle for shared, mutually agreed projects.
For more information on how to join us on a First Friday Walk, please contact us.
First Friday Walk dates 2026
- Jan 2nd : A Stroud-based walk Lead by Lucy Guenot.
- Feb 6th : a distal walk to be lead by Tamsin Grainger.
- March 6th : Lead by Rachel McDonnell and Sara Dudman.
- April 3rd : Lucy Guenot will lead a walk close to Stroud. Join us as we immerse ourselves in Spring.
- May 1st : To be lead by Andy Freedman.
- June 5th : Caroline Morris will be leading a walk relating to the Salmonsbury Field Walking Project at the Greystones Nature Reserve, Bourton-on-the Water.
- July 3rd: Valerie Coffin Price will lead a walk and draw event along the river Taff in Cardiff. A slightly shorter walk than normal with a focus on making work in response to changes and developments along the river as well as sounds, textures, atmosphere of the city and built up environment.
- August 7th: Co-led by Kate McMahon-Parkes and Ian Knight. The walk will invite us to consider the layers of human history within the landscape (this could be rural or in an urban environment). In particular, we wish to consider how humans have attempted to ‘create’, emulate or manage nature, and how ‘nature’ (whatever the term means) has (at times) reclaimed or obscured human interventions.
- September 4th: This months walk will be led by Amanda Steer. We will be walking on Cleeve Common thinking about accessibility and the interventions introduced to encourage access by all, the barriers there may be and the implications of offering these outdoor experiences to all. Starting off along Cleeve Common’s “Tramper Trail”, we will continue off it to complete a total of about 4 miles from start to finish.
- October 2nd : Led by Zoe Ashbrook. For October’s First Friday Walk Zoë invites us to participate in a series of mindful walking and creative observational exercises designed to focus attention and deepen sensory awareness to the landscape around us. Through sound, touch, and close observation of the environment and found objects, Zoë will offer prompts to explore how slow, creative engagement with place can foster embodied learning and deepen understanding of the landscape.
- November 6th : Walk to be led by Rachel McDonnell. She has recently spent some time in the Walking the Land Gingerbread House, built as part of the Growing Places project, and currently located near Bisley. The walk will explore the area around the Gingerbread House, and will include some steep and muddy sections. We will be out for around 3-4 hours through the afternoon, thinking about getting to know places which are near to those we know very well, but which, somehow, we haven’t ever quite come across. We will also stop at the Gingerbread House, perhaps for a cup of tea and a biscuit (gingerbread?) – which might be of interest for people who would potentially like to spend some time there themselves, immersed in the landscape which we will be walking in. Remote walkers are invited to walk, explore and get to know a place near to their everyday, within around 3-5 miles of home, but which either they don’t know at all, or which connects places they know well, but is not a route they have recently taken, and to think about the edges of the familiar.
- December 4th : Sara Dudman will lead this winter walk as a part of her residency at Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking