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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

Eleanor in ferns PSsmall.jpg

The Essay: Forests of the Imagination

Forests of the Imagination

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Forests of the Imagination

Fiona Stafford asks why artists are drawn to the imaginative possibilities of the forest.

Fiona Stafford goes 'Into the Forest' with Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough to consider why artists are so drawn to its imaginative possibilities.

What is it about forests that inspires our imagination? In this series of Essays for our Into the Forest season, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough takes five woodland walks with writers and artists who find themselves moved by the sounds, textures and smells of the forest.

She's joined first by Fiona Stafford, author of 'The Long, Long Life of Trees' and expert on the Romantic poets. Fiona is fascinated by the moment in the late 18th century when Britain's great forests were swept away by the demands of the Royal Navy and the Enclosure Acts. As the dark forests with their brigands and wild beasts disappeared, novelists and visual artists were free to conjure up their own dappled glades, to create spaces of romantic imagination.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

In midsummer week, Radio 3 enters one of the most potent sources of the human imagination. 'Into the Forest' explores the enchantment, escape and magical danger of the forest in summer, with slow radio moments featuring the sounds of the forest, allowing time out from today's often frenetic world.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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