At the start of May, Forestry England have re-evaluated all events scheduled in the forest, based on location and size, and pushed all external events back until at least September (after the Summer Holidays) due to the expected 30-50% increase in visitors to the forest over the summer as travel abroad is limited and with lock-down ending, they’re expecting to be rammed.
As such, Adderstone Field is now being used for all the Forestry’s events normally held in an around the visitors center as they need all available space to accommodate the massive increase in visitors and to maintain social distancing.
I only found out in the first week of May that we would be unable to use the Dalby site after contacting them to make sure we are all still OK after making the initial site bookings last year.
I had a meeting with the Dalby staff last week to try and find an alternative site but unfortunately, the 2 alternative sites in Dalby are not suitable.
One is far too small anyway room for 15-20 tents max, the other field is much smaller than Adderstone but it’s location would make it impossible to get campers or caravans or even the skip/toilet wagons through the gate. Plus there are other issues regarding security and the topography of the field.
With the timescales, increased costs of trying to secure a private campsite who are trying to get all the business they can and basically every campsite going to be rammed this summer without us being able to control access, light levels etc, it’s just not possible to relocate the event. Plus we would not have access to FE’s marquee outside of the forest area.
Currently, Dalby are not able to confirm dates for 2022 so I can’t even pass those out yet.
After the visitor numbers have been assessed at Summer they will look at accepting bookings for next year (new COVID lock-downs and variants permitting and international travel rules being relaxed to lower expected numbers in 2022).
As soon as I know details for 2022, I will email everyone on the mailing list.
Sorry once again, maybe 2022 will finally be the year we can get back to Dalby.
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