Kynren

This had to be a backblip as we didn't get home until almost midnight.

We had a super evening at Kynren. It's a spectacular outdoor pageant of drama and special effects which is held on Friday & Saturday evenings in the summer at Bishop Auckland, about 30 miles from Newcastle. I gather it was inspired by the summer show that runs annually at the Puy du Fou theme park in the Vendée region of France. A golf course was flattened and re-landscaped to provide 8,000 seats and a seven-and-a-half-acre stage for an historical re-enactment that tells England’s story through the prism of Bishop Auckland’s community, based around a time-travelling young lad. It brings all this to life with magnificent sets, combat, stunts, horsemanship, stunning pyrotechnics and amazing special effects set to an original soundtrack. It has a cast of 1,000 local volunteers.

The show is hard to define because it’s not an accurate historical account. Instead it’s a conglomerate of snapshots to celebrate moments that have defined us as a nation over 2,000 years. It includes the Roman invasion of Britain, King Arthur’s knights searching for the Holy Grail, King Harold being shot in the eye by that fatal arrow, Henry VIII meeting Francis I of France, Charles I’s execution, the industrial revolution and Sir Winston Churchill’s rousing call to arms during the Second World War.

We'd heard it was good and it more than lived up to expectation. There's more about it here.

(Note: The name "Kynren" is an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon "Cyn-ren" which apparently means "family, generation, posterity, stock": the time-travelling lad is finding out about his forebears.)

This photo shows the fireworks in the finale; I'm working on my other photos, which I'll upload to flickr when I get them done!  the other photos are now in a flickr album here.