New Events at Swinton Park’s Autumn Alfresco Parkland Food Festival

Swinton Park has announced that following the success of the Alfresco festival held in the hotel’s grounds in September, there will be a more extensive range of cookery demonstrations and entertainment on offer at the Autumn festival, being held on Sunday 12th September.

The Alfresco festival has been running at Swinton Park, the luxury castle hotel in the Yorkshire Dales, for two years now, and offers a very different take on the traditional food festival experience. Visitors are given a culinary trail to follow around the woodland and lakes in the grounds, with alfresco kitchens serving food en route. There are also guided tours of wild edible food and walled garden produce, and cookery demonstrations and "hands on" cooking opportunities such as making sushi and sausages with local experts.

The first event, held in May 2009, attracted just over 400 visitors, and it has since doubled in size to just under 800 at the most recent festival held in May this year.

In September, the event will be offering "Twilight Tickets" for the first time, aimed at visitors who want to enjoy the event later in the day. The Twilight event will be run from 4.00 – 9.00pm at the Deerhouse in the parkland, with live music, gourmet barbecue, real ale bar and entertainments. Entry to both Day (running from 11.00am – 4.00pm) and Twilight events will be £5 per person, with additional charges for refreshments and the tasting meal served at the alfresco kitchens.

New also for the September festival will be the artists in residence, who will be painting at the Deerhouse during the day, with studio sales and also workshops for visitors to try their hand. The landscape, produce and livestock are the theme, with nationally acclaimed artist Sue Moffit who is principally known for her characterful portrait paintings of cows one of the artists in residence with limited edition prints and her new range of "Moff" designerware.

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Press enquiries : Felicity Cunliffe-Lister : 01765 680944 : felicity@swintonpark.com

Notes for the Editor :

1. Swinton Park is a 30 bedroom luxury hotel with 4 Red Stars and 3 Rosettes for quality of food. It is the ancestral seat of the Earl of Swinton and is owned by the Cunliffe-Lister family, who opened it as a hotel in 2001.
2. The hotel has a cookery school, with day, evening and residential courses running all year. The residential courses are run by the TV Celebrity chef, Rosemary Shrager.
3. The gardens, including the four acre walled garden, have been extensively restored in recent years. The walled garden now grows over 60 varieties of seasonal herbs, fruit and produce. The hotel is committed to keeping food miles to an absolute minimum, with the majority of all other produce sourced by the hotel coming from the surrounding 20,000 acre estate and Yorkshire countryside.
4. The hotel has a carbon neutral woodchip boiler, eco-laundry and many other environmental measures in place – winning awards for its green policies.