Women's Wildseeker Morning Adventure at Downhill

Women’s Wildseeker Movement Practice: Ruck + Rewild

With Gail from The Clay Gymnasium

Dates: Sunday 27th July , Sunday 24th August 2025

Time: 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM

Location: Downhill Forest & Beach, North Coast, NI

Cost: £35 standard/£30 concession with EARLY_BIRD_10 OFFER (ends 20th July)

Level: Easy-Moderate, short hill walk to the forest trail.

Event Overview

Ruck + Rewild is a unique women’s outdoor movement gathering designed to reconnect you with your strength, creativity, and the living landscape.

This 3-hour journey blends functional natural movement, ecosomatic awareness, and playful exploration as we walk, climb, breathe, and create eco artworks in the stunning environment of Downhill Forest and Beach. Expect a deeply restorative and enlivening experience in community with other wildseekers.

What is Rucking?

Rucking means walking with a weighted backpack, a powerful practice we call 'Strength in Motion'.

Rather than a high-intensity style workout, we embrace rucking as a natural strength-building ritual. Carrying a sturdy backpack with essentials (picnic, water, swim gear, extra layers) with optional addition of small/ medium sandbags, helps to stimulate bone density, improve posture and gait, and engage the core, all while moving in rhythm with the land. Something our ancestors would have done to gather, carry, and walk for food, shelter, and explore beautiful moments in the hidden pathways.

What You’ll Experience

• Guided natural movement through the forest — rucking/carrying a weighted backpack, crawling, squatting, scrambling, balancing, and climbing to support building strong bones at any age.
• Eco-somatic awareness practices that deepen your sensory connection to earth, body, and breath
• Creative expression with found natural materials: making temporary wild art or documenting your experience with simple smartphone photography
• Rock scrambling and tree exploration to awaken curiosity and physical confidence
• Breathwork + grounding rituals as we move together from forest to coast
• Beach arrival for an optional sea dip (bring swimwear + towel) & buoyancy aid
• BYO picnic to rest, connect, and enjoy a mindful meal outdoors

All movements are scalable and alternatives given for all fitness levels: regressions and progressions will be offered to keep the energy positive and enjoyment high!

Your host:

Gail Mahon is the founder of The Clay Gymnasium and an ecoartist, somatic movement practitioner, and researcher at Ulster University. Her work bridges natural movement, sculpture, and ecosomatic practices to explore resilience, strength, and ecological health. A MOVNAT Level 2 trainer and interdisciplinary educator, Gail creates embodied learning spaces that support women and those experiencing menopausal transitions, centering movement, creativity, and collective care to activate mutual resilience. Her research reframes bone health as a multifactorial environmental issue, calling for cultural transformation in response to sedentary lifestyles that depletes vitality, passion, and bold living, restoring a vision of future health through power, play, and flow.

Together we become Stronger by Nature, as part of Nature.

What to Bring

• A sturdy backpack with:
• Water bottle
• Packed picnic lunch
• Swimwear + towel
• Warm change of clothes / extra layers
• Notebook & smartphone (optional for eco-somatic reflections and photography)
• Comfortable (flexible) shoes for forest terrain
• Openness to movement, creativity, and connection

Why Join?

Led by experienced artist, mover, and researcher Gail Mahon, this is an invitation to explore the wild spaces within ourselves while gathering insights into health and creative vitality in balance with the elements of forest and coastline. Downhill is an area known for its natural, outstanding beauty. Explorations will be both practical and playful insights, guided through movement, as we trace our creative energy as a journey towards vitality and possibility.

This practice is about more than fitness; it’s a return to your intuitive body and its relationship with nature through ecosomatics. It’s about feeling strong, expressive, and alive. Whether you’re new to movement or an experienced mover, this is a space to grow, reflect, and rewild, together.

Let your Sunday morning become a ritual of strength, joy, and reconnection.

Spaces are limited — book now to join this wild-hearted experience.