Arnside Silverdale AONB

Many congratulations to Peter Standing, the winner of the Bittern Award 2015.

Peter has managed the Arnside & Silverdale Landscape Trust’s annual event programme since 2010; attracting, entertaining and informing many local people and visitors to the area. Since taking on the role, Peter has introduced a popular and well attended annual weekend series of lectures, field trips and exhibitions. He also launched a ‘Meet the Villages’ weekend rotating around local venues with ‘Meet the Yealands’ (2012), ‘Welcome to Warton’ (2013), ‘Story of Storth’ (2014), ‘Beetham and Hale’ (2015) and ‘All about Arnside’ (2016). Silverdale in 2017 will complete the cycle.

During 2015 the Landscape Trust mounted a total of 15 lectures, 32 field trips, 4 tours, 7 exhibitions, 2 socials, one children’s event and one play ‘the Life and Times of William Hutton’. These events attracted cumulative attendance figures of over 4500.

Speaking about the Bittern Award Peter said ‘I am honoured but surprised to receive this award. I see it very much as recognition of the importance of the Landscape Trust, and I must stress that I am only one of a team of hard working Trust officers. My post as events organiser is a great job which has given me the opportunity to meet and learn from an amazing variety of experts on every imaginable aspect of the AONB. Organising events and new projects provides me with an exciting and ongoing landscape education course and it has been a pleasure to meet the wonderful people who attend events and make up the membership of the Landscape Trust’.

Peter is also involved in writing a series of geotrails set in the AONB and other nearby limestone landscapes. His guide to Whitbarrow came out last year and this year will see the publication of guides to Beetham and Arnside and an upgraded edition of the Storth and Sandside geotrail guide.