AUTHOR Matilda Webb will be offering four opportunities to take ‘A walk around Alfred Wallis’s St Ives’ during the town’s September Festival.

The walks with Matilda, whose definitive new biography Alfred Wallis: Child Pauper To Artistic Luminary was recently launched at St Ives Museum, are among 36 on offer to Festival-goers this year.

The new 90-minute strolls will take walkers past the places where renowned artist Alfred Wallis lived and worked, to see the views and subjects that inspired some of his paintings, and visit the iconic grave where he was buried in 1942.

Matilda Webb will also be in conversation with Ethan Carney from St Ives Archive at Illuminating Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) at Porthmeor Studios on Wednesday, September 24 (7.30pm).

Nicki Ferguson, will be conducting walks on all 15 September Festival days, continues the artistic theme with her two walks - ‘A Walk Amongst Artists’ and ‘Barbara Hepworth Bronze, Marble, Stone: The Life and Loves of a Sculptor’.

On ‘A Walk Amongst Artists’ Nicky will talk about St Ives as a community for artists from the early 1900s through to the modernists including Barbara Hepworth, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron and more, visiting galleries along the way and also discussing artists who work in St Ives today, keeping the town alive as a creative hub.

Her other walk Barbara Hepworth Bronze, Marble, Stone: The Life and Loves of a Sculptor looks at the sculptures Dame Barbara gifted to the town as Nicky talks about Hepworth’s life in St Ives, her passion for working with bronze, marble and stone and how she was influenced by the surrounding landscape.

There will be three offerings from local historian and long-time September Festival guide Tony Farrell with seven opportunities for his popular St Ives Town Walk Number One, that includes places of historical and cultural significance and explores the significance of mining and the growth of tourism and the arts are examined.

Tony’s St Ives Town Walk Number Two is an alternative walk looking at other aspects of the Town’s development including evidence for the earliest occupants of Porthia, mining and education in the town’s history.

He also offers his out-of-town Archaeology of West Penwith trips that visit the ancient monuments of West Penwith and the moors which contain fine examples of megalithic chambered tombs (locally known as quoits), stone circles, entrance graves, cliff castles and prehistoric villages.

Tony Mason is also returning with his popular ‘History and Mystery of St Ives’ walks on both Fridays of this year’s Festival.

With the help of photos from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he explains the significance of the fishing and mining industries, the coming of the railway, lifeboat tragedies, shipwrecks, the development of the harbour, customs and traditions, tourism and “anything else that takes the eye.”

All proceeds from the two-hour walks go to St Ives Archive.

Full details of all the walks can be found at www.stivesseptemberfestival.co.uk