Ellen Hutchins Festival 2025

The 2025 Ellen Hutchins Festival runs during Heritage Week from Saturday 16th August to Sunday 24th August in the Bantry Bay area.

The festival celebrates the life and work of Ellen Hutchins (1785-1815), Irelands first female botanist. It includes a wide range of events designed to encourage people of all ages to explore the botany of the Bantry Bay area through walks, talks, arts, crafts and history. Most events are free, many need to be booked.

See www.ellenhutchins.com for information on all the festival’s events and activities, including botany walks and workshops, and a great range of botanically-themed creative activities. Bookings for some arts and crafts workshops are already open. Bookings for other events will open on 1st July.

This is the 10th anniversary of the first Ellen Hutchins Festival which took place in 2015 which was the 200th anniversary year of Ellen Hutchins death in 1815.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the festival there will be a special town trail called 'Windows on Nature' using shop windows in Bantry and some other venues to explore and explain the small but significant plants – mosses and liverworts, lichens and seaweeds – that Ellen Hutchins specialised in; other windows will have seaweed drawings, specimens and archives that tell Ellen’s story; and there will be an exhibition in Bantry Bookshop using material from the Ellen Hutchins exhibition previously held in UCC.

This event is part of Heritage Week 2025