Authors, Poets, Presenters and Musicians
Julia Horton-Mansfield
Website
About
Born, bred and educated in Wales, Julia's background includes archaeological conservation, heritage and tourism. She was a committee member of the Brecon Beacons National Park, National Trust Wales, Heritage Lottery Fund and Vice-chair of the United Kingdom World Heritage Site Forum.
Julia has been a food forager since she was very young, but never realised that the picking and eating of wild plants actually had a name. In 2003 she founded the first wild food festival in the UK at St Davids. Everyone said it was a daft idea but she continued to organise the award winning Really Wild Food & Countryside Festival until 2017. It became the inspiration for the successful business that Julia and her husband, John, have now built up.
Just before lockdown they bought a rundown Art Deco Building in St Davids to prevent it being snapped up by developers (or one of the chains that are appearing in every town and city) and have developed an award-winning wild food restaurant and cafe, shop, letting rooms, teaching rooms and soap and skincare kitchen areas to continue producing the natural products that Julia has been formulating and making since the mid 1990s. Everything that Julia & John do at the Really Wild Emporium revolves around seaweeds and wild plants and they continue to run approximately 60 foraging courses a year on the seashore and around the ancient lanes of St Davids.
They launched, with Car y Mor (also from St Davids), the Wales Festival of Seaweed in May 2024, another first!
Julia has written articles and accompanying wild food recipes for various magazines including Plantlife and is currently writing a book about foraging on the 'Edge' (the UK coast).
She has four children who try hard to pretend she is normal. In reality she eats and sleeps seaweed, bathes in it and talks about it a lot. She even has a dog called Seaweed who has appeared on various TV programmes with her because he is much more appealing. One of the most weird things she has done is being interviewed sitting in a bath of seaweed on the street in London with Alex Jones on the BBC One Show...