15/06/2022
The race to reclaim the dark
Some 200 places around the world have now achieved Dark Sky status. Frankie Adkins explores the benefits nights without light pollution can bring.
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On dark nights when the Moon is hidden and the clouds are at bay, Kevin Hughes sits at the bottom of his garden and gazes up at a velvety black sky. In contrast to his childhood growing up in London amidst the glare of orange sodium-vapour lights, he usually sees hundreds – and, as his eyes adjust, thousands – of stars studding the night sky.
Hughes lives in Cornwall, a peninsula in the southwestern tip of England that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean. His home is in West Penwith, a region renowned for its rugged moors, granite tors and mystic stone circles. Dark skies are a portal to this heritage: "These are the same stars that cavemen in furs and woolly mammoths would look at in the Neolithic [era]," says Hughes.
