IT STARTED out as a small idea, but Adrian Lochhead was taken aback by the big response.

Lochhead, who took over last year as director of Eden Arts, the arts development agency for east Cumbria, thought that a number of local perennial events and some new ones could be brought together to make a festival under one banner, Best In Eden.

The idea was to celebrate the culture of a rural area that, perhaps even more than Dumfries and Galloway, is a hidden gem, covering the edge of the Lake District to the North Pennines and the beautiful river valley in between.

People usually storm through on their way to the central Lakes or Edinburgh and the Highlands, unaware of the quiet delights on offer.

Lochhead has friends in the south who think he works in Cornwall, at the Eden Project, and even comes across northerners who haven't heard of the most thinly-populated district in England.

So the idea was also to make the area more widely known, to increase the number of visitors and bring more money into the local economy at a time when it needs it.

He also wanted to show locals and visitors alike the range of the area's cultural activities and stimulate more artistic activity for everyone's enjoyment. And he wanted to get across the idea that art is not something separate from ordinary life and for a special class of people.

"We are really conscious of the modern perception of art, that it is a part of culture rather than separate from it. We wanted to join arts events with other cultural activities like cycling, food or walking - it is all part of the way we live our lives," he said.

So Eden Arts put out a call for people to join in.

"We expected about 20 responses and in fact got about 180 and our problem is to contain them in the festival," Lochhead said.

"It has been fantastic the way people have cottoned on to the idea and to the idea that small events can sit alongside big ones."

So a blockbuster like the Lakes Alive street performances, part of Britain's Cultural Olympiad, which will takes over Penrith town centre one Sunday in August, is shoulder to shoulder with a dry stone walling workshop at Greystoke in July; the now thoroughly well-established Potfest in the Pens, the big potter's showcase at Penrith cattle mart, is on the calendar along with a walk with poets on the Poetry Path at Kirkby Stephen.

There's a Cumbrian fish supper, cruise and music on Ullswater and another evening early music from Brampton Chamber Choir at Appleby, and so on.

Botanical illustration master classes, village agricultural shows, art exhibitions and artists' open studios, rag rug making - there's a whole kaleidoscope of stuff going on in Eden in July and August.

Who said it was a quiet life in the countryside?

DENIS INCH
Best In Eden, July 1 to August 31. See www.bestineden.com for details.