Towersey Village Folk Festival

"August Bank Holiday, just past, was Towersey Festival weekend, the quiddity of English folk festivals, where Morris sides from all over England rub shoulders with musicians of every age and gender, with fiddlers, story-tellers, Cossack dancers, ceilidh bands and players of every variety of portable instrument. It's a visual feast too, with banners and ribbons and gaudy stalls, as the festival-goers, stall-holders and performers compete to outdo each other in their symphonies and concatenations of colour and flamboyance. It's a weekend of roots in more than one sense: in forty years the songs affirming life and protesting against injustice have continued to raise the spirits, while governments, ignored or despised, have come and gone, their petty machinations or abominated alliances simply grist to the musical mill, the inexorable grindstone of history."
Wood Avens, 31/08/05, uk.religion.pagan

I thrive on music festivals. I'd hesitate to say I need them, but they contribute hugely to my general happiness. A weekend of musical festival can clear out half a year of angst. Last year I had two; one folk, one power metal, and about as different from one another as you might imagine. They both gave me the energy boost, the emotional clarification and relaxation, the uplift, but it was the folk festival that really did it. I went to The Big Session in June this year, which although a folk festival was a small one in the city I grew up in, and I stayed with my parents rather than camping, so it only had half the sense of freedom. The camp I went on with various of uk.religion.pagan filled in that half, but there was no music. So I'd been waiting for Towersey. I did kind of need it, after the office job and the funding stress and the unemployment and the rain. I needed it to get summer back.

Going with romauld made it especially nice. I was a little worried that he would steal all my attention away from the other festivalness, but it was fine, and although he'd never done the festival thing before he took to it like, um - well, like a beardy gothy larper mead-drinking folk musician to ( a folk festival ... )