Why does anyone need to be negative about any of this?! It seems that if you give folkies a chance to see their music in as many places as possible and promote it in a positive way....they all get on their high horses and start slagging everyone off!

What ridiculous questions guest: 'who pays for it?', 'who loses out?'. Why should that be any of your concern anyway? The organisers of the festival are putting on an event that anyone can go to. If you don't want to buy a season ticket, you can buy individual tickets for concerts. If you don't want to spend any money, you can just enjoy free entertainment from dance teams etc around the village....as with most festivals (and dance teams usually do this for no money, but in exchange for festival tickets, and any money they collect goes back to the festival).

Anyone who organises any kind of event is more often than not putting themselves at risk. Ticket sales hopefully cover the event....perhaps a bit of funding to help out, but at the end of the day the organisers take the risk.

I suppose it has to be run as a business, but not a profit-making one. The festival has to cover itself so that it can happen again and any profit would be put back in to doing just that next year, with maybe bigger/more named artists. That's the way folk festivals work. There are barely any festival organisers on the folk scene who make a personal profit from what they do. Most are voluntary and put in an astounding amount of their free time, while also having full-time jobs and families, to putting something on for the community, because they are passinate about it.

Who would anyone go through the stress of organising a festival and having to deal with all the criticism/bad mouthing that goes on in forums like this unless they were 110% committed to making it work?

Why can't you be happy that such a great line-up of guests are on in your area and ENJOY it?! And two festivals in the same area in the same month...well we're being spoilt now. Much better than having to drive miles to another festival to get our folkie fix!

Can we not just try and shed the stereotypical grumpy/pedantic/sad/cliquey folkie image that the rest of the world sees and ENJOY OURSELVES??