The Location
An earlier visit to Cheltenham that year had given details of an illumination show – ‘Festival of Light’ – around the time of Christmas at Sudeley Castle in Winchcombe in the Cotswolds in England. In due course we drove down near the closing day of the spectacle in time for an early evening tour. Parking was close and convenient though the evening air was chilly. The tour of the site would take about 45 minutes. It would be hard to find a site with such a legacy of rich historical links and where almost every phase of the major episodes of events in England had its outworkings within the castle. Major players would include Richard III, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I and Charles I. After the Civil War the castle was allowed to fall into a ruinous state and only after significant restoration works in the 1800’s was the castle restored to something like its former glory. The castle has been open to the public since 1971. Today the castle is now the home of Elizabeth, Lady Ashcombe, and her son, daughter and their families. Significant effort has been undertaken to create exhibition spaces in the castle to document the site’s rich history.
A Visitor From Space
As a postscript, the town of Winchcombe has been in the news recently in connection with a fragment of a meteorite that fell on the driveway of a house in the town in February 2021. Other fragments were recovered from the surrounding district. The type of meteor is a rare carbonaceous chondrite and is considered a highly significant ‘find’ dating from the creation of the Solar System. Such a find was equivalent to a capture and recovery space mission of an asteroid from the Solar System and which would have been otherwise hugely expensive.
The Illuminations
The theme of the Illuminations was Alice in Wonderland and various scenes from this storyline were readily identified. Other scenes displayed lighting effects against the backdrop of the castle. Only a small subset of the extensive scenes are included here. Some of the effects are probably created using ultra violet light sources that activates visible light on illuminated surfaces. Such effects are probably shown to best effect against a really dark environment. Such light shows are in general are significantly helped by using LED technology to provide light sources with low power requirements and which typically operate at low voltages.
