Saturday 16 July saw Imperial’s Silwood Park campus in Berkshire play host to this year’s Silfest, with the annual independent music festival raising enough money to buy two cows.

Silfest, or the Silwood Festival was first held in 1999 and has since become an entirely student-run event. This year’s festivities included a full line up of bands and DJs as well as fete-themed entertainments.

Silfest 2011 supported the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT), in particular their Chiltern Chalk Grassland Project. The project concerns the management of the increasingly rare habitat of chalk grassland.

With an original target to buy one cow to help graze chalk grassland sites, the amount of money raised from the festival led to the purchase of two cows instead.

Two of Silfest 2011’s organisers, Rosie Burdon and Mark Ramsden, hailed the event as a “massive success”.

“A capacity crowd of 500 people rocked up to see 12 bands and 3 DJ’s… from 12pm until 4am the next morning. The pick of the bands were Kentish Fire, the fantastic headliners Alphabet Backwards, The Winter Olympics, and our very own MSc Men and Late Night Munchies.”