The Rewilderbeest

Location: The Wilderness

Year / Period Created
2024

Description:
The Rewilderbeest is a play on the Hooden Horses of Kent and beyond. His head is carved from spalted beech offcuts from Cornwall, and his body is made from old coffee sacks. He was created to spark conversations about our natural environment: about the plants we turn into natural materials, land stewardship, and how we can live in greater balance with the world. The Beest is a little bit different from the other Hooden Horses I have seen in a few ways. A backpack with a ‘pillow’-type sack attached so that it is around head height not only extends his form, so that he has a long back without the wearer bending over, but also disguises the wearer’s head. His eyes are made from wood-mouse-nibbled hazelnuts, his ears from buckskin, and his mane from Somerset soft rushes, field rush, Jacob’s sheep wool, wood rush leaves, and bushels of meadow grasses from the Scythe Fair and On The Hill. He also has antlers made from burnt gorse sticks gathered from a swaled part of Dartmoor. I wanted the mouth to stop before it opened all the way, so the lower jaw is on a leather hinge at the top, with a metal T-plate coming out from the back of the lower jaw. This stops the mouth opening too far because the end of the T-plate hits the inside of his head. A string is tied to the end of the T-plate and runs down the central pole. The extendable metal pole is glued into the wood and held with a bolt. The Beest is very dancy and swishy and loves to frolic and twirl, with a naturally excitable, cheerful and inquisitive nature and movement.

The Rewilderbeest is the last of its kind, found with its head in a bucket in my back garden, sloshing about to get water I have since discovered that the dear beast, after wandering around for quite a while on its own, unable to find any of its fellow Beests, lay down to sleep under a hawthorn bush. When it woke, the world had changed and there were huge metal beasts digging up the patch of ground where it lay. I have been able to visit this site, which I won’t disclose, but I can say that it was once an old railway siding, quite unremarkable other than its tangled, untended wildness. It held our Beest for what I have ascertained to be about 400,000 years—around the same time as the Giant Elk in Ireland. Beestie often tells stories about just how big and awkward they were, and how they were so easy to trick into getting stuck between trees!

What Was the First Event the Giant / Beast Attended?
The Beest had many beginnings. His head was decorated on May Day 2024 with morning flowers, and in some way this was his first life event. But officially, the first time the Beest took to the streets and met the wider world was in Ashburton at a May Day weekend event held by Field System. He was inhabited by the fabulous Jim Penny and accompanied on the violin by the marvellous Ben Moneypenny. We all had a jolly time accompanying the beast, roaming through the streets, investigating the folk, ice cream and street plants. The day ended with a wild dance with Grim Bear and Grimspound Border Morris.

Does the Giant / Beast Still Exist? If Not, When and How Did It Retire?
Going strong.

Any Tales of Outings, Visits, Strange and Wonderful Occurrences, or Special Memories That Should Go Down in History?
The Beest is the proud winner of The Sidmouth Horse Trials 2024, where it was accompanied by Ruth Webb and showed off its magnificent olfactory plant-identification skills, proving its worth when it came to the great broom jump. The Beest marched for nature, the land and all its wild kind at the Restore Nature Now March in London in 2024. Since then, it has joined the Chagford Mummers and has even won a mum-off against the Strolling Mummers!

Who Carries the Giant / Inhabits the Beast, or Is It a Shared Role?
Jim Penny was the first of the Beest’s dancers or carriers, and his spirit remains within. Since then, the beast has been carried by myself (Ruth), Amy, Tyler and Maria, and played with by many others.

How is it stored?
Happily looking out of the window in my workshop at the Theatre Alibi building in Exeter St Thomas, the place of his inception and most of his creation.

Maker / Creator(s)
Ruth Webb (lead), Amy Webb and, would you believe it, no relative but Jules Webb!