Snowdon shines for dark skies artists

A project helping showcase Wales' landscape and connect people with the outdoors has reached a climax on Snowdon.

Scores of people made a special trek to the shores of Llyn Llydaw below the summit of Wales' highest peak to create a special light show as dusk fell.

The Green Space Dark Skies project has visited all four corners of the UK over the past six months.

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The event took circus performers from the area and art students from Bangor's Coleg Menai up Snowdon's famous Miners' Track to the shores of the lake on the 3,560ft (1,085m) mountain.

Each of the 50 or so performers carried a special torch - lightweight, wirelessly-controlled colour-changing LED domes - known as "geolights".

Nicknamed "lumenators", they were then choreographed on the mountainside.

The performance was captured by a team of film-makers, and will be shown as part of a special broadcast highlighting the Green Space Dark Skies project on the BBC's Countryfile programme in October.

Thomasine Tomkins helped recruit volunteers for the project

Thomasine Tomkins, who recruited young local circus artists to take part, said the experience was "not for the faint-hearted".

"First of all, I had to make sure all my performers were the sort of people who could cope with walking across the mountains," she said.

"It is fun - some of it's hard work. I think we were all dripping with sweat, because we've been walking up and down the mountain.

"I feel we are quite culturally deprived here, so it's absolutely amazing that they've come to our home turf.

"It's absolutely been worth doing - I don't think there's been anything like this round here before."

As dusk fell on Snowdon's Llyn Llydaw, lumenators gathered on its shores

The performances on Snowdon followed events at Three Cliffs Bay in Gower, Craig-y-Nos country park in the Brecon Beacons, and at what was once Britain's most important copper port and mines at Amlwch on Anglesey.

These will be featured in a programme called Green Space Dark Skies Wales on BBC One Wales on 2 October.

Pulled together by outdoor arts experts Walk The Plank, its creative producer for Wales Liz Pugh said their films were celebrating "the diverse landscapes shaped by the extraordinary geology beneath our feet wherever we step in Wales".

"Our journeys have taken hundreds of people across ancient pathways or brought us into contact with today's uses for land that once powered the extractive industries of Wales - like mining and quarrying.  

"Artists and scientists have brought their poetry, their learning and their imaginations into the work - and the films convey what can happen when we add ordinary people who took part in an act of collective endeavour rooted in landscape."