Imogen Taylor tells of a serendipitous trip to the college bar which ended with her watching the Northern Lights from John’s Gardens.
Like many of you, I witnessed the extraordinary northern lights, or rather the aurora borealis, last week. The very rare occurrence has captivated people for millennia and it is true that this captivation has never died. It was in the early 17th century that the astronomer and scientist Galileo Galilei termed the spectacle the Aurora Borealis. The name took after the Roman goddess of dawn and the Greek name for the north wind.1 Nowadays we know the science behind the northern lights but during the Viking Age it was believed that they were the armour of the Valkyrie warrior virgins that emitted a strange flickering light.2 The allure and magic of the lights, however, have not been lost on modern society.
The “beautiful dancing ribbons of light”, as one writer has termed it, entranced students across Durham.3 Many ventured to Observatory Hill and others, like myself, gazed at the northern lights from the gardens in John’s on the evening of Friday 10th. It was a serendipitous fortune that I managed to witness this spectacle, having had no prior knowledge of the possibility of the occurrence. My friends and I had decided to go for an evening walk amidst the stress of exam season. It was on our walk along the the river bank, that encircles the heart of the City of Durham, that we decided to make a short stop at our college bar (I might add that we are livers out in our third year). As one drink turned into another and procrastination reared its head in the most student appropriate manner, we lost ourselves in the comfort of nostalgia on Library Lawn. As the evening went on we journeyed to the Bailey Room for a game of pool and then returned to the garden, this time amongst the party of bodies on Linton Lawn that had accumulated as the evening went on.
It was only when we had gone inside for the first time in several hours that the aurora borealis materialised and we were rushed back outside by the beckoning of Fergus, one of the barmen, who had been gathering up everyone to witness this rare moment together. The spectacle was never to be forgotten with the pure enjoyment that radiated off every Johnian that evening. Call me sentimental, but my friends and I thought it to be special that we witnessed the northern lights for the first time in our lives on the lawn that we had made so many memories in the past three years. And it was all because of a fortunate stroke of serendipity that we were not in bed and instead under the radiant glow of the aurora borealis.
Photos taken by Tomek Bickersteth.
- “The Northern Lights”, accessed May 17, 2024, https://discoveringthearctic.org.uk/science/arctic-science/the-northern-lights/. ↩︎
- “Facts and fiction about the northern lights”, accessed May 17, 2024, https://www.visitnorway.com/things-to-do/nature-attractions/northern-lights/facts-about-the-northern-lights/. ↩︎
- “Northern lights (Aurora borealis): What they are & how to see them”, accessed May 17, 2024, https://www.space.com/15139-northern-lights-auroras-earth-facts-sdcmp.html. ↩︎
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