"the older universities were fine places, with venues ranging down from mighty lecture halls, through good stages and performance spaces - all the way to little resonant niches and blind corridors for informal sessioning." - sounds a lot like Sutton Bonington, which is an Agricultural College.

The range of different types of occasion that can be covered by the word "folk festival" is very wide indeed, and I think it's be worth having a thread discussing it. It's a bit the same with the term "folk cklub", or "session" - we use them and we often tend to think that other people are using it to mean the same thing, but the range is enormous, even in one country.

Like someone not too long ago commented favourably on the fact that folk clubs in England tend to be in pubs - but it had never really occurred to me that you could have a folk club that wasn't in a pub. Even the one near us that happens in a church vestry has a bar.

So with festivals they range all the way from the big show biz efforts down to local ones based round a single pub, plus a bit of cavorting round the streets. And even with the big festivals you've got some which are all big venues and distant performers, and some which are masses and masses of small venues, and sessions round every corner. And you've got a few which do it both ways, notably Sidmouth in my experience.