Halloween Hullabaloo & Travelling Treeluminations 2018

Between the 24th October and te 31st October we ran our inaugural Halloween event to raise funds for The Savage Dig. It was a huge success and we thank all of our wonderful supporters who came along and experienced it. We started with a kilometre walk around the forests. They were all lit up by Walter Holt, who had previously lit up Mount Stewart. There were three areas of lights, deep in the forest, down by the lake and finally a full on musical performance by the pond. The beautiful music was specially written by Sharon Graham from the North Coast. She wrote four new pieces and recorded them all. The joint work of Walter and Sharon produced an ethereal atmosphere. Luckily the weather held out and whilst it was incredibly cold, the stars and moon were brilliant.

After the light and music performance visitors were invited to walk through the walled garden. There were lots of friendly witches and ghosts and if you wanted a scare – there were nature zombies on hand. Giant spiders webs and spiders lurked in many corners. A team of 29 scouts had spent the night here the weekend before carving out the 60 pumpkins required to light the visitors way.

Once the visitors made it through the garden they were welcomed into an area with dunking apples, roasting marshmallows, puppet making and the delicious Broughgammon catering trailer.

A return walk through the haunted farmyard and a pop up cemetery found the visitors back at their car parks an hour or more later.

The feedback was amazing and many people have asked if we would be putting on the performance again next year. It was a very expensive event to stage and we did manage to raise enough to cover costs and to put towards the dig next year. The volunteer hours that were put in reached over 2000 hours. We started working on the event in February and will have just finished putting away the last of the ornaments tomorrow (November 14th 2018).

We would love to gather as many photos of the event that people are happy for us to post.

If you wish to be kept informed of next years event information you can sign up to our email list – we will endeavour to update everyone every quarter and more frequently in the run up to the event. You can unsubscribe from the list at any time.

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Next year’s event will be ticketed event again – however we will not be able to give access to people without a ticket between 6 and 7:30 pm.