During the evenings before and after the Trail we are busy booking a variety of speakers and musical acts to perform at Kilve Court.

On the SATURDAY night we have already booked:

1. Dr Sasha Dall – an evolutionary biologist from Exeter University with a lecture entitled “Unintelligent Design: Unravelling the Complexities of Life”  along with his wife:

 2. Dr Caitlin Kight who will give us a fascinating insight into her work on the affects of urbanisation on birds.

3. Peter Exley: SW Public Affairs Manager  for the RSPB who will talk about albatrosses, partly because the Trail crosses the Coleridge Way and..

Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

..and because the RSPB is hard at work conserving the Albatross internationally.

He’ll also be mentioning the amazing story of the Somerset Cranes.

4. Kevin Cox from the World Land Trust who will give us an equally ‘worldly’ vantage point on habitat conservation and the work of the World Land Trust.

5. On more philosophical matters we also welcome Alom Shaha   - author of ‘The young Atheists handbook‘.  Tim Minchin decribed his book – “More than just a great handbook, this is an honest and often very moving story about valuing truth over hope, even in the face of grief.”

Along the Trail on Sunday our walkers encounter a range of contributions, including  one from Professor Norman Maclean of Southampton University – author of ‘Silent Summer‘ – who will speak with unrivalled authority about the current state of UK biodiversity.

To provide a more local angle we will also hear from Nigel Phillips – author of ‘Somerset Coast‘ – a Quantock based ecologist with 30 years of experience in Nature Conservation and a particular interest in all matters marine.

We will also hear life stories from some of our cousins in the family tree, tales of drifting continents and horrifying mass extinctions. Indeed, if you wish to volunteer to speak briefly at your favourite rendezvous, please let me know!

However, because the history of Life on Earth takes us to places so spectacularly unfamiliar, to retain our  emotional bearings we will be organising some artistic offerings along the way. In previous years this has included gentle folk ballads, harmony from a  twenty-strong choir, an evolutionary rap artist and a rendition of Jonny Berliner’s  ‘Large Blue Butterfly blues’ which, in common with 2 other Trail pieces, was written exclusively for the Trail.

This year we aspire to widen our artistic interpretation even further to include poetry, a flute player and, because 2012 is our ‘Year of the Bird’, some bird inspired music.

Acts who are already keen to perform (assuming our pitches are successful) are:

1.    Jonny Berliner    - returns for a repeat performance with his witty and wonderful science songs including a brand new song to celebrate our 2012 ‘Year of the Bird’.

2.     Stephen Preston    - we are also thrilled  to welcome this English flautist who is famous for his classical renditions and, more recently a whole new musical language ~ ecosonics ~ based on ‘birdsong’.*

3.    Soalcake    -  return with some folk ballads and dances.

On the Sunday night there will be an evening of cabaret from the performers you will have met previously along the Trail.

Participation in the walk itself is FREE, but you will see our prices on the pitch for the various accommodation packages, Trail bus, AT-taxis and (in due course) the evening events.

Part of your contribution is allocated to our wildlife charities.

However, we only JUST made our pitch last year (with a little extra help from our friends – thank you Taunton Humanists) and this year’s target is MUCH bigger, so we’ll need to attract more investors. Please forward our event details to anyone else you think might be interested to help us make the 2012 event happen.

Click on the Crowdfunder icon to the left to see our pitch.

Please note:  Our booking system is going LIVE soon. Please drop me an e-mail (via the contact tab) if you would like me to let you know when it’s ready.

The Trail is inspired by Richard Dawkins’ book “The Ancestor’s Tale”, subtitled a Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. The book rewinds the evolutionary history of our species, and many others, back to our shared origins 3.7 billion years ago.

The Ancestor’s Trail traces the same journey on foot. We align Darwin’s Tree of Life with the many footpaths straddling the Quantock hills and place groups of walkers at the tips of selected branches. Symbolically, as each group follows their trail, they walk further into history until, at pre-specified times, they rendezvous with the walkers following the Human trail. In this way our ever-increasing band of ‘pilgrims’ arrives together at the Dawn of Life ~ Kilve beach, appropriately famous for its fossils.

Along the trail, rendezvous points will be marked by appropriate words of wisdom, music and performance.

This “pilgrimage” is a shared experience organised by humanists to celebrate the simple and ingenious truth that all life on Earth is related through evolution. Although we claim this as a shared experience for non-religious people; because, by definition, our common origins belong to us all, we warmly extend an open invitation to all people.

How does it work?

You’ll need to manipulate Darwin’s evolutionary tree in your head. Lie it flat along the spine of some picturesque hills in Somerset; its branches approximately lining up with its many tributary footpaths. Now add yourself at the end of one particular branch, representing one specific life form, and start walking towards its roots. Symbolically, each step will take you back in time.

If we are to reach our goal in a sensible time frame, each step must represent thousands or even millions of years.  In terms of the life forms with which we are most familiar, very little happens in the first few billion years of evolution, and yet, especially from a primate point of view, everything happens in just the last few million years.  Given this, we decided to create three different scales over the trail. The first expands our mammal centred period since the terrible climatic catastrophe that ended the reign of the dinosaurs. From this point on you will walk back 10,000 years every step. Beyond this point, our time travel increases by an order magnitude to 100,000 years per stride and then, for the last 2.7 billion years, we increase by another order of magnitude to around a million years every stride. In this way we ensure a relatively constant procession of rendezvous throughout the trail.

Eventually our symbolic re-enactment will reach its ultimate origin; the dawn of life itself. Staged along the rolling green hills of the Quantocks (an area of outstanding natural beauty) , we are very fortunate to be able to end the Trail at Kilve beach ~ a beautiful, rugged, rocky beach which is, appropriately enough, famous for its fossils.

People can choose their walking distance through the Trail they adopt. The longest Trails are nearly 20 miles, but for less hearty walkers or younger families, there are a whole range of shorter options. The Gazelle Trail is 10 miles, the Starfish Trail 5 miles and the Bacteria Trail less than a mile!  If you wish to avoid walking altogether, you can simply and turn up at the beach at the allotted time and join the party!

Our website includes a Google Map of the Quantock Hills. This provides links to detailed route plans for all the trails and once booked, we will add your name on your trail so you can see in advance with whom you will be walking. On specified trails marshals will lead you up to the main Trail rendezvous to make sure you don’t get lost!

Choosing your trail:

*First open the :  Google Map of the walk. You can choose to walk one of any of the many different trails, each one representing a different branch of Darwin’s tree. You need to decide how far you want to walk or, if you prefer, which life form you wish to represent. The distances are shown for each trail, along with a rendezvous arrival time that will ensure you meet up with all the other walkers on the human line of the Ancestor’s trail.

Richard Dawkins’ 2004 popular science book, The Ancestor’s Tale, is loosely

modelled on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Instead of pilgrims journeying to

Canterbury, Dawkin’s protagonists are living species, journeying back through

evolutionary time. In real time, individual species diverged and speciated. But in

the backwards time of The Ancestor’s Tale, separate species start the

journey apart, in the present, and “converge” together as they descend into the

past. Humans “meet” the chimpanzee and the bonobo around 6 million years ago.

We all continue back in time together, rendezvousing with gorillas another

million years earlier. The time doubles before the next convergence, with

orang utans, at 14 million years ago. Dawkins takes his readers back and back and

back. We eventually meet rodents and rabbits at 75 million years, amphibians at

340 million years, lungfish at 417 million years. Insects, spiders, worms, snails

and other protostomes are all more closely related to one another than to us, so

on their own journey they have already converged. We meet them as one huge

scuttling, crawling, sliding band at around 590 million years ago. The common

ancestor – the “concestor” in backwards time – which we share with the

protostomes, was probably worm-like, segmented, with a mouth at the front, and

probably had eyes.

Dawkins reversal of time is designed to exorcise the “conceit of hindsight”,

in which all of evolution is seen as something inevitably progressing

towards the human and in which we lazily describe one species as

“more evolved” than another, for example. The Ancestor’s Tale is a

fascinating overview of all life on earth. Our small hope is that the

Ancestor’s Trail will help to illustrate the tree of life by symbolically

walking the journey back to the origin of life.      Bob Churchill.