Three-Day Heritage Intensive

 Follow colour out of the Cumbrian fells
A weekend retreat at The Colour Makers House, Appleby-in-Westmorland

Ochres from under our feet. Green-grey slate from Honister. Black graphite from Borrowdale. Copper from a mine Elizabeth I seized from an earl. Reds a Cumbrian privateer's ships brought home from the Americas. Over three days you'll find where each colour came from and make it into paint with your own hands. After this, you'll notice them on every fell you walk.

Friday evening: The House

You arrive at a Stuart townhouse on High Wiend, rebuilt in 1677, where colour is still made. Your host, Mark Hilsden, is Britain's only practising medieval pigment alchemist. At the bench you'll handle the weekend's raw materials: Honister slate, Pennine ochres, copper compounds and lake pigments.

Saturday: Into the fells

At Honister Slate Mine you'll wash, settle and grind the green-grey slate on site. Below the pass lie the Seathwaite wad mines, the purest graphite ever found, worked by the Elizabethans to cast cannonballs. Then on to Goldscope Mine in Newlands, where German miners dug copper for Elizabeth's cannon from a hillside that also holds azurite and malachite. In the afternoon you forage for colour across the fells with Mark.

In the evening you make the reds and purples of cochineal, the cargo of George Clifford, the privateer Earl of Cumberland. His wife Margaret practised alchemy, and a book of her recipes survives in the Cumbrian archives. No two batches come out quite the same, just as it was for the makers who came before.

Sunday: Pigment becomes paint

You finish your collection, bind each pigment into paint using your medium(s) of choice, and learn how to continue at home or in your studio. Before you leave, we walk to St Lawrence's Church, where Margaret Clifford is buried.

You take home: hand-ground pigments, the paints made from them, and guidance notes.

Who this is for. Painters, calligraphers, and anyone who has wondered how a manuscript's blue was made. No experience needed. If you want a relaxed craft weekend, this isn't it: it's slow, careful chemistry, with fell walking on the Saturday.

"He was very adept at catering the course towards my needs and other students."
Maya, after a two-day course at The Colour Makers House 2026

P.S. Karen Marshall summed up her time at the House in five words: "I forgot to go home."