Alresford Watercress Festival 2009

The Festival Organiser's poster for this year's festival

If you visit Alresford, Hampshire early enough in the morning on Sunday, 17th May 2009, you may see some very strange-looking people in the street.

There'll be grown men dressed up to look like a giant watercress salad, Medieval street musicians and the Watercreess Queen in a local parade that kicks off the watercress celebration.

Watercress is grown around the town in beds of gravel fed by mineral rich spring waters. This tangy vegetable is one of the more neglected super foods, but not by the citizens of Alresford, Hampshire and the thousands of visitors that come each year for the festival.

With the ever-growing return to wholesome food, watercress is back on the road to popularity as one of the health foods that not only tastes good, but also adds a peppery punch to dishes that contain it.

You can enter a watercress-eating contest and never feel the effects of a weight gain like those that win pie-eating contests. Best of all, you can find some very unusual foods at this festival. The town's pubs, coffee houses, and restaurants all compete for the best watercress dish and you can sample the delights that they invented. You might find watercress ice cream, watercress chocolate, watercress sausages or even get lucky enough to sample the watercress beer.

Celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson loves to create watercress recipes and often appears at the festival to show you how to make them. He wrote a book of recipes about watercress!

There were about 40 stalls selling different local foods in the 2008 festival and more are expected this year. There you can find not only new and delicious ways to serve watercress, but also local fare and homemade goodies that make your mouth water. The festival has everything a true "foodie" could want, and more. It has a very peppery flavour!

As with any good festival there are craft stalls that provide hours of browsing fun and some unusual unique gifts made by local artists. There might even be a stall selling local wine, conveniently bottled for later.

In Alresford, there’s always live music and street entertainment. 2008 saw performances by Juggling Jake, BasinCog Morris Men, Hook Eagle Morris Men, a local Celtic-jazz fusion band called Ash and live dancing. You can get your face painted, do a bit of wall climbing or ride the historic Watercress Line, the train that carried the watercress to the Covent Garden Market during Victorian times.

This beautiful Hampshire town brims over with history and antiquity. You can visit the festival but if you want to get away from the hustle and bustle for a while there are walking paths and tours of the watercress farms. Once you visit the Alresford Watercress Festival, you’ll never look at watercress the same way again.