Doug Scott

Artists will gather in Cumbria for a festival devoted to mountains.

The inaugural Mountain Arts Festival will be held at the Rheged Centre near Penrith, organised jointly by Community Action Nepal and the Royal Geographical Society.

Three days of talks, readings and discussions will include presentations by British Everest summiteers Sir Chris Bonington and Doug Scott. Art exhibitions by painters, sculptors and photographers will feature in next month’s festival, with proceeds going to help CAN’s Nepal earthquake appeal.

The festival includes painting and writing masterclasses, demonstrations of Herdwick wool weaving, a Nepalese bazaar and a second-hand climbing book sale, plus more than 30 separate events taking place across what promises to be an unmissable weekend.

The Mountain Arts Festival will take place from 6 to 8 November, with a special debate on the Sunday hosted by the RGS north-west region and chaired by Lord Inglewood, president of the Uplands Alliance. Whose broad, sunlit uplands? will bring together a range of noted speakers to discuss how best to manage the uplands in the UK.

The festival will take place at Rheged

There will also be a variety of musical performances over the course of the festival, a Ceilidh led by Striding Edge, as well as various acrobats and singers from Mongolian artists to Dean Johnson’s musical biography Ice Picks and Violets.

More details and prices are on the Rheged website.