THE delights of darkness this week will be celebrated in some of the North East’s wildest countryside.

The wonders of the pollution-free dark night skies and the secrets of thousands of years locked in the dark peat of the North Pennines is to be explored in an event tomorrow.

The free Dark Matters evening has been organised by the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty Partnership at St John’s Chapel Town Hall, Weardale, from 7pm.

AONB Partnership’s Peatscapes Project manager Paul Leadbitter will outline the programme which is restoring the area’s peat bogs, while English Heritage’s paleobotanist Jacqui Huntley will reveal how evidence of the climate and landscapes of the distant past is being revealed by tiny pollen grains and bugs preserved in the peat.

The night skies will be investigated by Dr Ed Restall of Stockton Council’s Wynyard Observatory and Dr Pete Edwards of Durham University, who will talk about gravity, gas, stardust and other discoveries.

A star map will be provided by Graham Relf from Rookhope in Weardale, a keen amateur photographer who has been involved in astrophotography for many years.

From Rookhope high in the North Pennines, Graham took the stunning picture on this page of Zeta, one of the three stars in Orion’s Belt.

Physics graduate Graham has worked in software design and development for years and was until recently a technical architect for a major commercial web site. In the 1980s and 90s he worked for a pioneering company in the field of image analysis.

Jacqui Huntley is regional science adviser for English Heritage and an honorary research associate in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University.