In addition to festivals, there was the annual mid summer outing, which saw fifty excursionists sitting on wooden planks and bails of straw travelled the sixteen-mile distance in open farm carts to Keswick, where they were ‘encouraged to enjoy their own entertainment’. The single journey over bare hills and wooded roads took almost six hours to complete. In contrast, in 1867, Lawson sponsored a visit to the Paris Exhibition, offering a grant of £3 for every male and £4 10s for every female who made the journey. Lawson did not confine the grant to his workforce; almost half of the twenty attendees came from the immediate neighbourhood.