Wiltshire Safari Park getting ready for biggest event of the year

Longleat's Festival of Light's opens tomorrow

Author: Aaron HarperPublished 8th Nov 2024

A Wiltshire Safari Park is making the final preparations for its biggest event of the year, with more than a quarter of a million people expected to attend.

Longleat's Festival of Light opens to the public on Saturday (9th Nov), with visitors being taken on a journey through time.

Project Designer and Lead Daisy Mercedes told Greatest Hits Radio they're really excited to welcome the public to the display.

She told us it a unique event: "Longleat is just amazing as a landscape, but really the main feature the Festival of Light holds is the element of storytelling, which is quite unique at Christmas to be able to create a tradition with lights and music, but also physical structures."

Daisy said the structures have be seen to be believed.

She said: "The lanterns are incredible. You have structures which are made for a metal silk and then hand painted. We have over 1000, some of them weighing 5 tonnes.

Some of them are 20 metres high, that's as tall as Longleat house and it's really just something you can't imagine until you see it."

The event is also celebrating 75 years of Longleat House being open to the public.

Daisy told us about this years theme of journeying through time.

"We're able to go back in time, see the dinosaur, see the Ice Age, go all the way to ancient Greece and ancient Rome and be submerged into these really educational and quite historic elements, which create an incredible landscape."

The Festival of Light runs until 5th January 2025.

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