BUTCHER Mark Duckworth has jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire for the eighth National Sausage Week celebrations.

The driving force behind Dales Traditional Butchers, in Kirkby Lonsdale, Mark (pictured left) always offers at least ten varieties of sausage for sale every week. But from Monday, as his contribution to the latest banger-fest, meat-fiend Mark will attempt to make ten different sausages a day - for six days.

Among them will be bags of award-winners including Mark's regional champion pork, duck, orange and Cointreau' sausage and his national gold medal-winner chicken, black pudding and thyme'.

There will also be lots of traditional favourites like Cumberland, and Westmorland; but customers can expect the unusual too like chardonnay chicken and apple' and rabbit and vegetable' as well as a taste of the world with Indian lamb jalfrezi sausage, French Toulouse, South African boerewors and Chinese five-spice pork.

For the health conscious there will be gluten-free sausage and low fat sausage. Mark is even planning to reintroduce his popular fisherman's sausage' packed full of piscine treats.

Mark has been wanting to stage a sausage celebration since he opened in Kirkby Lonsdale six years ago but it's only now that he has acquired the manpower to rise to the challenge. Such has been his success in the town that Mark's business has managed to create jobs for a further three full-time and four part-time butchers.

There will be sausage celebrations in Windermere too where John Nicholl, of Huddlestons, has recently scooped three gold medals in the National Federation of Meat and Food Retailers awards. The winning bangers were Cumberland; traditional pork; and saddleback pork and sage made with pork from Tom Slater in the Lyth Valley.

Meanwhile, butchers John Lord and Jason Fairclough, from Plumgarths, near Kendal, were traditional' category runners-up with their Cumberland ring in the Foodservice Sausage of the Year 2005 competition organised by the British Pig Executive.