Bygrave Woods (Herts)

The Facebook page for Bygrave Woods in Newnham describes the venue as “An uninhabited woodland ready to host your events”. Controversially, Vegan Camp Out (VCO) was held there in 2025. Controversial because the owners, the Farr family and cousin Ed Wainwright-Lee, own a poultry processing facility, have a history of shooting, and the latter was featured in a photo-op and article of him riding with the Puckeridge Hunt. In August 2025, Hertfordshire Hunt Sabs posted “C𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐎𝐍 𝐀 𝐒𝐇𝐎𝐎𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐓𝐄” on Facebook further slamming the venue and pointing out to visitors that they should “remember you are on a shooting estate. If you do go wandering about you will see pens crammed with hundreds of pheasant poults getting bigger to be shot in weeks to come.” In September 2025 Devon County Hunt Sabs wrote that: “I don’t get out of Devon much, but recently I tagged along to Vegan Camp Out in Hertfordshire. As anyone who has been in the countryside for more than 5 minutes could immediately tell, the event was being held on a shooting estate.” VCO says that the actual venue of the Camp Out, Bygrave Woods, “has nothing to do with animal activities/chicken farming…Every single outdoor venue in the country unfortunately is connected with animal agriculture in some way… or that the land itself is used for animal farming/shooting/hunting etc…it’s about as close to being vegan friendly land as you can possibly get for an outdoor festival venue in the UK.” For a festival explicitly labelled as ‘vegan’, is ‘close enough’ good enough…we don’t think so.