Speakers for the 2021 Keswick Mountain Festival have been revealed.
Presented by Craghoppers and hosted in the Theatre by the Lake on Friday September 10 and Saturday September 11, the line-up includes award-winning outdoor author and TV presenter Cameron McNeish and a panel including BAFTA award winning filmmaker Richard Else and ultra-runner Sabrina Verjee, for an evening dedicated to celebrating the Wainwrights.
Tickets for the speaker sessions will be available from July.
Visitors will also have the opportunity to see Terry Abraham’s Life of a Mountain – Helvellyn on the big screen, followed by a talk by Terry about the experiences making the film and the two others in the mountain trilogy.
Cameron is an award-winning author and television presenter and will share stories from his most recent book, There’s Always the Hills, and from his long career in the outdoors.
Cameron has lived in the shadow of the Cairngorms for 45 years, but has always says that if he is ever kicked out of Scotland, he would immediately head for Keswick, a place he loves with a passion, which will come to the fore during his presentation.
On Saturday, the Theatre by the Lake programme will start with a screening of the featurette film Brave Enough, which follows Jo Moseley’s 162-mile stand up paddleboard journey from Liverpool to Goole along the Leeds Liverpool Canal and Aire & Calder Navigation.
Jo also picked up litter along the way and raised money for the surf therapy charity The Wave Project and 2MinuteBeachClean Foundation.
The theatre also will host a Women in Adventure talk. The audience will hear from Frit Sarita Tam, adventure filmmaker and photographer, and Elise Downing, runner, hiker and public speaker, about life in front of and behind the camera.
The finale of the speaker programme in the Theatre by the Lake will be a celebration of all things Wainwright-related.
In recent years, the 214 peaks identified by Alfred Wainwright in his seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells have made many headlines.
Leading ultra-runner Sabrina Verjee is strongly associated with the Wainwrights.
She completed a continuous round in under seven days in 2020 and was on course to set a fastest known time for a round earlier this year until the weather and asthma intervened.
Sabrina will talk about her love of running on the fells and her unfinished business with the 214 peaks.
She will be joined by BAFTA-winning filmmaker Richard Else, who is the author of Wainwright Revealed, an account of his time working on the classic BBC TV series in the 1980s that featured Alfred Wainwright and Eric Robson.
Richard will offer an insight into a man with whom he spent a lot of time on the hill.
Tickets for the KMF speaker line-up will be available at www.keswickmountainfestival.co.uk from July 26.
