🧙♂️ THE MAN ON THE SILVER MOUNTAIN wasn’t me today but I’ll help light it up one of these… nights.
It’s called the Lakeland Festival of Light, and every year a few hundred people climb up it with head torches. Oh, sorry – up Catbells, I mean. Keswick’s ‘other’ local mountain, I would say, along with Latrigg and Walla Crag.
The thing with Latrigg, which I think of as ‘Keswick’s Wainwright’, is it suffers from across-the-road syndrome. Although here, it’s across the lake. You know when there are two buildings right across from each other: one lovely and the other an eyesore. Which would you rather live in? Not necessarily the pretty one with the direct view on the ugly one, right?
When you’re in Keswick, you rarely look behind you to lovingly admire that oversized lump known as Latrigg.
No! Keswick has a lake and on the other side of that lake is a beauty known as Catbells, and that’s what you look at. Even squinting directly down overlit Stanger Street, the glorious curves of Wainwright No.189 immediately enchant the eye.
It’s quite clever and I’d like to know how they do it. There must be some serious organisation needed. Not only must they get all the troops in place with the equipment needed at the right time; they also have to decide when to point their headtorches towards the town in unison.
Although they can’t see us down here in the town, gazing up at them, gazing down us as… I imagine it must be quite a thrill to know that somewhere, way down there people are smiling and even feeling quite touched in some indefinable way.
The sensation’s elusive but much as I dislike football stadiums and crowds in general, there’s something undeniably moving about a lot of folks doing the same thing at the same time.
We’re so desperate to feel and create something larger than this, something bigger than… us, that when we actually pull it off, it takes us by surprise.
So, that was the Keswick Catbells Light Show, I’ve seen it at last, I’m pleased, my boy and my folks saw it too, and I guess I can go to my bed, if not yet my grave, happy. She she she shine on…
Happy reflecting!
The Laggard of Lakeland 🌄
🧭 (Lakeland Chronicles No.42)
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