Stainsby Festival is an annual

folk music Folk music is a music genre that includes traditional folk music and the contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be called world music. Traditional folk music has b ...

festival held in the

Derbyshire Derbyshire ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East Midlands, England. It includes much of the Peak District National Park, the southern end of the Pennine range of hills and part of the National Forest. It borders Greater Manchester to the nor ...

village of Stainsby, England. It usually takes place in July over three days.

History

Stainsby Festival was first held in 1969 at the old school in Stainsby village. It was launched by Stainsby Arts Centre, which had been set up in 1967 and closed in 1971 due to council cuts, and was organised by Ann Syrett and Bob Walker among others. The idea of a weekend folk music festival was successful and so continued each year. In 1973, it won the ''

Melody Maker ''Melody Maker'' was a British weekly music magazine, one of the world's earliest music weeklies; according to its publisher, IPC Media, the earliest. It was founded in 1926, largely as a magazine for dance band musicians, by Leicester-born ...

'' award for 'worst bogs at any festival'. In 1974, the school building was leased by the

National Trust The National Trust, formally the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, is a charity and membership organisation for heritage conservation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In Scotland, there is a separate and ...

to a boys' school from

Bradford Bradford is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Bradford district in West Yorkshire, England. The city is in the Pennines' eastern foothills on the banks of the Bradford Beck. Bradford had a population of 349,561 at the 2011 ...

, who did not want to host the festival. However, it continued after Dot Brunt of Brunt's Farm offered the use of her fields. The 1975 festival was put on successfully without dropping a year, and over the following years the date of the festival moved from early July to the

August bank holiday A bank holiday is a national public holiday in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland and the Crown Dependencies. The term refers to all public holidays in the United Kingdom, be they set out in statute, declared by royal proclamation or held ...

, before settling on its current date, starting on the third Friday in July. In 2000, Dot Brunt died, but its second benefactor, Paddy Lane, bought the house and fields in order to keep the festival alive.

Activities

It has music venues and several family-oriented events, with children's storytelling tents, group rhythm workshops and face painting activities. Camping is available in a field adjoining the main arena. The festival has three stages. A large marquee constitutes the main stage, and there is a tent with a bar that makes up the second, known as 'The Hat Block'. Each year's lineup is varied, but tends to be predominantly acoustic folk. Since 2012 the festival includes in its programme, ''Earthwork'', a series of talks and workshops. There is a smaller tent called 'The Third Thing' hosting multi-media events, poetry, theatre, spoken word and other workshops. The festival usually ends with a procession, often involving the use of fire. In 2005, the procession was centered on a

flame A flame (from Latin ''flamma'') is the visible, gaseous part of a fire. It is caused by a highly exothermic chemical reaction taking place in a thin zone. When flames are hot enough to have ionized gaseous components of sufficient density they ...

, apparently originating from the fires of

Hiroshima is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 1,199,391. The gross domestic product (GDP) in Greater Hiroshima, Hiroshima Urban Employment Area, was US$61.3 billion as of 2010. Kazumi Matsui h ...

after the

atomic bomb A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb ...

was dropped. This coincided with the 60th anniversary of the end of the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

References

{{Reflist

External links

Stainsby Festival websiteEarthwork blog
Music festivals in Derbyshire Folk festivals in the United Kingdom