Chalke Valley is the Glastonbury of history; entertainment, education and chocolate dinosaurs

I bolted out of my bed an hour before a working day would see me rise, giddy with excitement to climb into the car and head west on the A303. We were off to a farm field transformed to a temporary town by a profusion of tents, stages and thousands of people. We’d spend the day drifting from one stage to another, listening to the delights we’d picked out from a packed programme.

No. I wasn’t off to Glastonbury. A lot of festivals grace England’s green and pleasant countryside. The one that sets me aquiver is the Chalke Valley History Festival.

Running since 2011, with the inevitable break for Covid, the festival is a mix of historical re-enactment societies, talks from historians, musical entertainment (heavy on folk and WWII) and old time carnival rides. It’s set in an exquisite valley, long and broad enough to hold thousands in a sprawling, 70-acre fairground but deep enough to screen out the rest of the world behind towering earthen walls undulating with green wheat. And the end of the valley, where hills rise on three sides to form a bowl, there’s a natural arena where battles, demonstrations and equine racing and manoeuvres are played out for the audience lounging on the hills. There’s a WWI trench experience cut into another hillside and a display of old steam vehicles sprawled across one of the slopes.

On the valley floor, main stages share room with the encampments of the various historical societies, a shopping area, historic carnival rides decked out in Edwardian glory and a happily modern court of food trucks. For the duration of your visit you’ve been transported to a place where Romans mix with Napoleonic troopers, Roundheads and Cavaliers share a drink under the pub marquee and medieval knights stand behind you in the queue for barbecue. Total strangers lose their English reserve to talk about what their reading, evaluate the mock battles and ponder the what ifs of history.  The almost complete black-out of network reception due to those enormous hills adds to the feeling you’ve left the real world behind.

Historical re-enactment societies and the cosplay around them are well established in England, with most groups having a full schedule of “camps” at various events through the summer where they strut their stuff. We run into Wellington’s troops regularly at the Highclere Battle Proms and the Sealed Knot re-enacting a major battle in our neighbouring village of Old Basing every year. For years, English Heritage brought all these groups together for an annual crossing of the timelines called The Festival of History, which morphed into History Live! Before they shut it down in 2015 to focus on smaller local events. We’d loved the English Heritage event, despite its Midlands location being a logistical challenge,  and had been searching for an alternative since its demise but hadn’t succeeded until this weekend. 

Chalke Valley has all the thrilling scope of the old English Heritage event but with an infusion of the Hay Literary Festival. It’s also, happily, just over an hour from our house, on the west side of Salisbury. Alongside the battle re-enactments and strolling through the re-enactors encampments, there’s a full schedule of lectures on four different stages, with many of them spotlighting authors of new books who sign copies in one of the two festival book shops after their events. James Holland, a historian who regularly pops up in the media, and James Heneage, founder and former CEO of Ottakar’s book stores, created the Festival. Dan Snow and his History Hit empire are now heavily involved (they own one of the four main stages). Thus it’s no surprise the festival pulls in some big names. Ian Hislop, Dan Jones, Niall Ferguson and Emma and Nicholas Soames were knocking about on our day. 

The literary festival approach adds a freshness that the English Heritage event lacked. However spectacular, it was pretty much exactly the same every year. At Chalke Valley, the lecture schedule means no two days, much less two years, will be the same. On the down side, it means there’s so much going on you can’t possibly do everything in one day. We had to make tough choices between competing activities (Talk Like a Viking or New Thinking on the Wars of the Roses?) and were so enthralled with the talks that we didn’t have time to take in anything in the arena. Nor could we linger long beside the excellent live music provided in the entertainment area.

The literary angle also requires more advance planning. While one general admission ticket (£16 on weekends) gets you into the fairground and two of the lecture stages, the two main stages require pre-booked £15 tickets for each talk. Big names sell out, so planning is essential. Children’s activities are also booked and paid in advance, so if you want to attend Sword School or the Trench Experience, you need to get your act together early. (We didn’t.)

If you love history as much as we do, the result of your pre-booking could be a very expensive day out, especially if you end up buying the books related to the lectures you attend. But all profits go to improving how history is taught in British schools, so it’s hard to imagine a better expenditure.

My favourite lecture of the day came from Ruth Scurr, whose new biography of Napoleon takes the unorthodox approach of looking at his life through the prism of the gardens he was associated with. The majority of Napoleonic literature focuses on big books by men about big battles, debating whether he was ultimately a hero or villain. Scurr’s approach looks much more at the man and his influence on science, nature and the arts. Piers’ pick was Samir Puri and Zareer Masani taking a fresh view of imperialism and empire. After years of the mainstream academic view being that it was all bad and Britain should beat itself up over the legacy, here are two authors with roots in Commonwealth countries bringing out reasons why it wasn’t all bad.  Later, we were both fascinated and horrified by Sarah Churchwell’s evaluation of modern America. I wasn’t expecting cheerfulness from The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade the day before changed the direction of discussion significantly. Like me, the author is an American who’s lived here more than 20 years, and her views of what’s going on in our homeland are grim. “The civil war has already started,” she asserted, pointing to mass shootings and urban violence. A large English audience, who were fascinated, perplexed and more than a bit scared, contributed to a lively Q&A.

Away from official lectures we found out more about recent archeological discoveries at Waterloo, got to try on medieval armour and were captivated by tales of Monmouth’s rebellion. I chatted about the impressive growth of HistoryHit with the company’s main podcast producer and managed to be in the right place at the right time for two showy ride-bys of lavishly costumed horses and riders. I was delighted with the intellectual twist that saw ice cream from the Jurassic Coast served with chocolate dinosaurs rather than the traditional Flake. I even got in a bit of archery, using a longbow for the first time and sinking half my arrows into the straw torso of a supine medieval knight.

I’d been looking for something like this since English Heritage pulled the plug on its festival. Though we’d tried a couple other options, nothing we'd found compares to this. I haven't packed this much childish delight into one day since my last time on Disney property.  

I do have a few hopes for improvement. Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and the American revolution are all societies I've seen at other events but were missing here. I'd love to see them add to the fun. And though the Ancient Romans were present, their numbers were much smaller than I've seen in the past. The shopping area has a long way to go. Given the history association and, one assumes, the above-average income of attendees, I was expecting a lot of hand-made, artsy stuff of the sort you find at high-end craft festivals, as well as historic or history-inspired clothing and hats. The handful of vendors on site were underwhelming. With the exception of the magnificent Waterstone's book tents. And that's about it. The day was pretty much perfect and I didn't want to leave.

Chalke Valley is Glastonbury for history lovers. After my inaugural visit I’m thinking that, like Glastonbury, you need to stay on site at least one night in order to get the full satisfaction. Unlike Glastonbury, this doesn’t involve bringing your own kit and pitching tents in the mud, but reserving one of the festival’s quite respectable-looking glamping tents. Which means you can stay into the evening for historic dinners, music and witnessing the illumination technology of campers through the ages. Who’s coming with me in 2023?