Help dream a most unlikely dwelling into being.
Join Leigh and Mark in calling forth a new space at Spillian: a refuge, a folly, a threshold, a home for the Hallowed Hermit.
We’ll wander through the mythos of hermitages and hidden shelters, tracing their enchantments and imagining how our own hut might emerge: what splendid oddities it could cradle, what quiet wisdoms or gentle absurdities might unfold there, how it will live both in the real woods and in the imaginal realms of SpillianQuest. Together we’ll step into the dream itself as we imagine the League’s future Hermits who will one day dwell here, keeping company with solitude, welcoming wanderers, and dispensing bits of wisdom (or folly) to those who seek the way.
About the Imaginarium Series
Step sideways into another world. Here, imagination has gravity. The ordinary tilts just enough to let the marvelous through. Each Imaginarium gathering is a living moment in our new expanding universe of SpillianQuest: intimate circles of up to 20 co-conspirators who weave the reveling together. With extraordinary chef-made feasts, fires and candlelight, and an enchanted historic estate.
And each Imaginarium is its own quest: a small act of rebellion against the rush of the everyday, a chance to revel in the delight of co-creation. And somehow, in that shared play, something genuine takes root: connection, belonging, a touch of wonder. Come as you are and let’s play together.
SpillianQuest: reveling fuel for people yearning to make meaning.
A mycelial web of tools, toys, treats, adventures & boon companions.
A Special League of Spillian Revelers
Overnight Co-Creation Adventure
What Awaits You
- Programming, materials, and festivities for two people
- Afternoon refreshments with house-made Spillian treats
- The Yule Feast for two, with carnivore and vegivore options
- Overnight lodging for two in one of Spillian’s eight rooms
- Sunday morning breakfast for two, featuring our famous bagels
- Wine, local beers, and Spillian cocktails available for purchase
- From our kitchen: A complimentary tin of Cat’s Love Tea and packet of Bliss Crisps to fuel your next quest
- Finding new boon companions in the League of Spillian Revelers
When
- Arrive at noon or so on Saturday and settle in by the fire
- The Conjuring begins at 1 PM
- We’ll say farewell at 11 AM on Sunday
A quest awaits before you arrive. Details when you book.
League registration available through the Secret Door.
What We’ll Do Together
Stories of Solitude and Sanctuary
Tales of hermits and hidden dwellings, from mossy medieval retreats to eccentric English garden follies, exploring what they’ve meant as spaces of stillness, imagination, and belonging.
Conjuring the Hut
Creative conversation to imagine what our Hermit Hut might become: what it holds, how it welcomes, and the kind of quiet company it offers. Expect sketches, wild ideas, and the occasional snort of indecorous laughter.
Marvelous Objects
Dreaming up the artifacts and oddities the Hallowed Hermit might tend: astrolabes and journals, lanterns and bones, tea cups that never empty, and small wonders waiting to be found by wanderers.
Becoming the Hermits
Imagining League Hut retreats: short stays of reflection and play, both holding space for themselves and offering delight and wayward wisdom to those who pass by. The Hallowed Hermit is also awakening in the realm of SpillianQuest, and we’ll explore how this archetype might move between worlds, blurring the line between life, play, and transformation.
The Hermit’s Feast & Firelit Folly
As evening falls, we’ll gather around Spillian’s great table for a rustic feast inspired the meal a hermit might secretly long for, sharing wondrous imaginings of future Hermits, those who will one day dwell in this place.
Dreams in the House of Stories
Dream the dream onward in one of Spillian’s eight splendidly whimsical rooms. Which have you not stayed in yet?
A Breakfast for Return
On Sunday morning, featuring our bagels and apple turnovers (of course!) before we return to the wider world.
Why We Gather
Together, we are dreaming the League of Spillian Revelers into being as we conjure a hermit’s hut in the forests at Spillian.
The power of making.
In a world that is fractured and sharp, and everything seems to be breaking, to help shape a place that carries our breath in its walls and stories as it is dreamt forward is both a remembering and an act of indomitable hope.
Savoring the sacred in the absurd.
Reverence doesn’t always come robed and still. Sometimes it stumbles in laughing, tripping over its own wonder. The small, the silly, the seemingly purposeless hold a kind of grace that solemnity can’t touch. When we let go of the need to make meaning, meaning sidles in anyway, barefoot and uninvited. This is the dance between the foolish and the holy, the exquisite strength of things that refuse to choose one or the other.
The art of belonging through play.
There’s a kind of alchemy that happens when people dare to wonder in the same direction. The League is both a playground and a fellowship: a place to tumble ass over teacup through wild ideas, to risk foolishness in good company, to test meaning the way others test flight. Here, belonging isn’t about sameness; it’s about resonance. What we create together reminds us that play is not escape but emergence, and that joy, taken seriously, can change everything.
The wild company of solitude.
The Hermit’s path winds between silence and song. We crave time apart — to listen, to unspool, to remember who we are when no one’s looking — yet we also long for the spark that leaps between strangers who meet at the edge of the fire. The Hut waits at that crossing. Here, solitude becomes fertile, and community playful. We might find ourselves laughing in small acts of pretend, or startled into honesty by an unexpected question. The wild calls us inward and outward at once, asking what opens when we let both stillness and delight lead the way.
Believing imagination changes the real.
Philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote that imagination is the voyage into the land of the infinite. For those who live half in story and half in the world, that voyage is a homecoming. We long for what we imagine to leave fingerprints — for the worlds we dream, play, and build to solidify, even for a moment, into something we can touch. When we imagine this hut into being, it’s a small act of alchemy: thought becoming place, myth becoming wood and firelight. And if we can do that here, maybe the rest of the world isn’t as immovable as it seems.
