Home is where you burn at.

🙋

Thank you very much for the update and for exploring those questions with Mike and Pam, Richard!! Exciting :) Have put those dates in my calendar.

A last year at Marthrown feels right and my hope is that this year we can narrow in on key needs for a new site and empower ourselves to begin preparing for them and for people to take on some responsibilities in doing them.

In the market research discussion at the end of the burn, a key point mentioned by those unsure on whether we should move next year (2025) and by those preferring not to move was the need to grow our community. The reasoning for growing the community was largely due to the need for enough volunteers to make a low infrastructure site like Knockengorroch - which was our main viable alternative last year - work. I think a key part of doing that should be building a real website so that we can have clearer information on what our burn is and why it's so lovely, so as to attract enough members for the coming year.
Thank you to those who have been active in the website building telegram chat here: https://t.me/+iZG1Ee9KPfFiNWM0 and in the Tech Nerding chat to work on a replacement for Trello. If anyone else has capacity and interest in supporting the building of a website please join the group.

- If we go ahead with one more year at Marthrown and then keep Knockengorroch as our main alternative for a future site, what would people see as our first most important steps over the coming year?
Perhaps we need to think about a place to store infrastructure that we possibly buy? Perhaps we would need to get in touch again with Knockengorroch to see what their price estimate would be if we used their site in 2026 (and if they anticipate that being okay). From there we could estimate needs/cost of infrastructure to buy or rent. Other key next steps?

🙋! Thank you so much, Richard and Victoria, for your leadership on this. And I'm grateful to have dates for April 2025; both my work and family calendars benefit from very-long-range planning.

🙋 let’s definitely book Marthorn, I’d personally be happy staying longer under new owners until we find a better place / up skill as a community more on developing infrastructure xx

thanks everyone for the hard work🔥

💗 didn’t mention in my previous comment, but I’d also be happy with the potential of staying on with the new owners until we’re definitely there with our communal resources/skills - as long as the new owners seem cool.

What is interesting is that when chatting in more detail about selling the business, Mike used the term - a going concern -meaning all infrastructure as I mentioned but added to that is all the contacts. Many of the dates they book out are repeat customers and have been for many years and we can totally see any new owners considering the fact half a dozen dates can already be secured in the diary before they've even unpacked their bags!

The only reason we didn't get the week earlier was because of a rouge wedding but we could be that repeat business if we pitched it correctly this year.

Super keen to stay for this year! It feels like there was momentum to grow our community before CB24, but we struggled to sell memberships. I know our current site is expensive, and others may be cheeper, but we need to base future discussion off actual numbers and not hypothetical interest. I really enjoy the size of our burn and would be sad to see it grow exponentially and loose the feel of a small burn.

I am also very worried that a handful of people carry out the majority of work pre/during/post burn. We need to grow the number of people who are willing to commit significant effort to Celtic burn before considering expanding our site. This is especially true if we have to create our own infrastructure. As it stands if one or two of these people didn’t engage one year it would be incredibly challenging for the rest to absorb their work load.

I am happy in the current site, that being said I would be pleased about a move to a site with greater accessibility.

I'm feeling sad that we haven't managed to get enough traction on the discussion for 2025, and that in this community we don't yet have this wonderful part of the Burn spirit that is doing a proper Build together... and I'd like to be part of a group of us who start doing that.

So firstly: can we actually have a discussion about a new 2025 site, please? I don't actually agree that Marthrown 2025 should be a foregone conclusion yet.

Secondly, beyond the matter of 2025: I would love to see us move forward (soon/now) with research/scouting toward actually finding an appropriate site for 2026+ as this seems VERY needed. Knockengorroch is not a good option for a future site- it is too cold and too large a leap forward for this community in terms of the work needed to make it work well.

I see a lot of material resources - large/bell tents, vans/transporters, generators/solar arrays, stoves, etc. - already present in this community; and such are essential for recreating in an open field, the glampy/comfy experience, with plenty of cosy communal spaces, which we've grown accustomed to in Marthrown... However it's not enough, and to set it up well will require higher levels of coordinated elbow-grease than we've put in last year - i.e. a proper Build in the pre-event weekend. A mere arrival&deco-Monday will not suffice...

I estimate that the effective way for our community to grow into this ability would involve an in-between solution for one or two years, on a site less bougie than Marthrown but also less rough&bare than Knock. For example: a site containing a stable central structure suitable for supporting our 100p+ catering Kitchen, but without permanent glamping yurts around it... Running water OR an electrical power grid, but not BOTH, already provided for us by the site.

Doing these things, and starting to do them now, would seem wiser and more progressive to me than hoping that Marthrown under (an unknown) new ownership will still work out for us.

@fox of light I'd agree that Knockengorroch is not exactly the ideal step down and I think the in between option you describe would be great if we could find it.
Personally I am getting the sense that at the moment several of the people who have been key contributors to Celtic Burn planning in the past are a bit stretched/lower in spoons/time/commitment ability. I'd love to be proven wrong on this, but if true, I think it's best we solidify plans for CB 25 at Marthrown and then put concerted efforts into searching for a new potential site.

I would be more than happy to put in efforts to find a new site, but I'm wondering if @Sam Lee or anyone who looked into sites previously has any tips on how they searched for sites fitting to our needs? I have had a little bit of a google myself in the past and recently and I haven't found anything close to what we'd need, so am wondering if there's any helpful tips on ways to search or if word of mouth is best? Not living in Scotland I think I'm missing some contacts/routes of exploration that others might have.

@Rachel let's call it as it is: There is one key contributor (the one you tagged) who is currently low on spoons and commitment ability (for extremely understandable/justified reasons); and even this person would not choose Marthrown for 2025 if we had a good alternative (I know because I asked them directly), they are just not in a position to do the work of finding this alternative themselves.

And this is what I'm talking about: this task should NOT be on them in the first place. It is my hope for this community that we grow up (as in 'mature'; I'm not making a comment about size here) and do not see ourselves paralyzed or incapable of making forward-looking decisions at any time that one (or several) key contributors are less-available.

To re-iterate and summarize my advice for this AP:

- Marthrown 2025 should not yet be treated as a foregone conclusion- please discuss!

- Let us (all but Sam) put in some effort towards finding an alternative site to Marthrown; let this new site pose a reasonable/interim leap-up in the Build challenge department; and let's start doing this now (in q3 of 2024) please! To this end I am able and happy to facilitate connections/collaboration of specific people with time&energy together with those with local knowledge ^^