Abstract
The Cerne Giant Festival is an annual event in our village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset, running during late April and early May each year. It began in 2017. It encourages attendees to develop a sense of connectedness with nature, which may lead to an awareness of the declining state of the planet and an increase pro-social ecological action. This is an ambition shared by others active in this sector.
Our experiences suggests that nature connectedness is not an abstraction but is rooted in a sense of place – often starting with one specific place but then widening outwards. To us, therefore, developing a sense of place goes hand-in-hand with developing a sense of nature connectedness. Nature connectedness develops through repeated participation in place-based relationships that operate simultaneously through perception, meaning, spirituality, identification and belonging. This can be viewed through the lens of the wide range of activities in the Festival programme over many years.
Thus, our discussion of the Giant Festival is shaped by the language of the sense of place literature (Raymond et al., 2017), nature connectedness (Beery & Wolf-Watz, 2014) and place spirituality (Counted et al., 2024; Diehm, 2022).
Background theory
We come from a scientific tradition, adopting a critical realist perspective, believing there is a single reality, but that reality is complex and our ways of finding out about it are limited and open to interpretation. Since we can only ‘know’ the world through our shared perceptions, there is no clear distinction between ourselves as subjects and the objective reality of the world.
We believe that the present is strongly built on the past. In some places, such as Cerne Abbas, this is more obvious than in others. We carry the past with us – in our personal histories and in the history of the place.
We think that an attachment to a place is accompanied by meaning-making, and we develop a personal centre of meaning, to rationalise our sense of attachment. Nature connectedness often develops alongside place attachment and place meaning, reducing the perceived separation between self and the environment. We summarise this progression as: ‘This place is our place, and we are part of its environment. The environment’s glories are our glories, and its problems are our problems’, although the progression is probably not linear and is more recursive.
The development of place attachment, place meaning and nature connectedness develop through a series of experiences, both “bottom up” and “top-down”.
Bottom-up experiences are the sight, sounds, taste, feel of the place. The wind in our hair, the rain on our face, the smell of the wood. They are what Raymond et al call ‘fast’ processes. Top-down experiences filter through local context, cognition, knowledge, story-telling, history, reasoning, beliefs and attitudes about the physical, social, or personal qualities of the place. These are ‘slow’ processes, that emerge through longer-term processes of social construction.
Not all drivers of a sense of place are visible and material. Spiritual ties to a place, which becomes ‘sacred’ can be of deep significance for many people. These can be associated with religious sites and natural environments and can be explored as ‘the sacred in a place’, ‘social activities in sacred places’ and ‘spiritual realities in a place’ (Counted et al. (2024), p.65).
The development of a sense of place and nature-connectedness, should, we believe, lead to a sense of action. As people develop richer relationships with place, previously unnoticed affordances may become visible and increasingly actualised. (Raymond et al., 2017). These may be instrumental, seeing opportunities for social and economic benefits. This is one of the defining characteristics of human evolution. As we ascribe more intangible emotional, symbolic, and spiritual meanings, we might discover pro-social ambitions, to conserve, maintain and heal broken landscapes.
The Giant Festival at Cerne
This festival has run through late April and early May for nine years in the Dorset villages of Cerne Abbas, Godmanstone, and Minterne Magna. It is hinged around May Day festivities, which are free. The other workshops, talks, performances, and walks are ticketed on order to cover expenses and raise funds to maintain the medieval churches in participating villages. Its audience is mostly adult, largely drawn from the locality and the wider county of Dorset. On one level, the instrumental aim is to create a varied programme of activities, that people will want to attend. Most of the activities draw on the knowledge and skills of people who live in the villages.
At a deeper level, it is possible to use the theory of place to determine certain underlying themes that can promote a sense of place and nature-connectedness.
We can broadly classify the wide range of activities into five types.
- Encounters with the dawn, seasons and landscape
- Sunrise on Giant Hill
- May Day at the Silver Well
- Mindfulness and quiet attention (Mindfulness with Natural Objects)
These activities are experiences that engage sensory perception (light, sound, weather, movement) and invite visitors to have awareness at specific moments (dawn, season, river conditions). They directly stimulate fast, pre-reflective meanings. These can help to create a new emotional bond to the place or reinforce or deepen an existing bond. They help us to realise that “we are not ecological outsiders looking in, but insiders all along.” This is the basis of ‘deep ecology’, (Diehm (2022).
These activities cultivate:
- awe,
- reverence,
- anticipation,
- stillness,
- communal joy.
- Wildlife encounters and citizen science
- Riverflies Safari
- Minibeast Safari
- Otters
- How to Understand a Trout and its World
- Beavers
These activities provide experiences that also engage sensory perception, but which go further to demonstrate craft skills or provide knowledge of the environment.
The fast sensory experiences are presented alongside opportunities to develop slower, more reflective meanings. “Developing a spiritual connection to a place requires deeper connection than a purely physical connection” (Counted et al. (2024), p.61), which includes an awareness of our commonality with these fellow-inhabitants of our ecosystem. Diehm calls this “identification as kinship” (Diehm (2022), p.63).
3. Skills, stewardship, and working-with-nature
- Learn how to Cast a Fly
- wildlife gardening
- Farming in the Cerne Valley
- Wild Brew! The Making of the Beltane Brew
A stage further, is to realise that this place – your place – has new opportunities for you to try and develop. Raymond et al call this “affordance actualisation”: actualisation occurs when environmental opportunities are matched with personal abilities.” (p. 7). This can benefit the whole community, not just the individual, and might eventually lead to an individual being more inclined to care about nature, and ultimately, to protect it. (Beery and Wolf-Watz (2014).
The activities position their audience as participants within living, changing ecosystems, and encourage emphasise skill, restraint, attentiveness. They move away from a view of nature as instrumental, a thing that we can consume, towards a framing where nature is something we relate to, not consume. Affordances link ecological features with social practices.
4. Music, dance, poetry, and walking stories
- ceilidhs
- Singing the Landscape
- Morris procession
- poetry rambles
- concerts
These activities provide a variety of experiences within a social, communal context. “…place meanings are treated as a social practice that cannot be understood outside of interactional, cultural, and institutional contexts in which they emerge (Raymond et al. (2017), p. 4), creating opportunities for collective meaning-making. Synchronised movement embodies social cohesion. Connection must be lived and embodied, not merely understood. (eg (Diehm, 2022), p. 73)
5. Living in a sacred landscape
- May Day at the Silver Well
- Wessex Morris Men Procession
- The Giant in a Sacred Landscape?
- Albion Dreamtime
- Church-based events including ones exploring the history of the locale
These activities embed Cerne within mythic, historical, spiritual and ritual narratives, and reinforce social and collective identity (“this is the kind of place Cerne is”). Importantly they connect present-day residents to deep time and tradition. Although this aligns with Raymond et al.’s slow place meanings, the activities are experiential, involving the engaged participation of participants, thus allowing a deeper connection to form (Counted et al., 2024).
Summary
The sacredness of the landscape around Cerne Abbas builds on Christian and pre-Christian origins. It combines the religious and the secular. Rituals, regularly enacted bring myth and deep time into the present and promote slow meaning-making and a collective sense of place identity.
The repetition across years is a crucial part of developing and maintaining a sense of place, especially in its socio-cultural aspects.
In the Giant Festival, nature connectedness here is relational and practical, not abstract or sentimental. Personally-based identification refers to a sense of connectedness that results from our own first-hand experiences, (Diehm, 2022), p. 62).
References
Beery, T. H., & Wolf-Watz, D. (2014). Nature to place: Rethinking the environmental connectedness perspective. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 40, 198-205.
Counted, V., Meagher, B., & Cowden, R. (2024). The Nature of Spiritual Ties to Place: A Conceptual Overview and Research Agenda. Ecopsychology, 16(1), 60-70. https://doi.org/10.1089/eco.2022.0078
Diehm, C. (2022). Connection to Nature and the Case for Deep Ecology. ETHICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT, 27(2), 59-81. https://doi.org/10.2979/ethicsenviro.27.2.03
Raymond, C. M., Kyttä, M., & Stedman, R. (2017). Sense of place, fast and slow: The potential contributions of affordance theory to sense of place. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 1674. https://public-pages-files-2025.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01674/pdf
Jane Still and Neil Ingram
24/06/2026
Cerne Giant Festival 