Day 4 At The Woodford Folk Festival

By Day 4 we had seen a lot of great music so we spent a lot of the day just soaking up the atmosphere.

It is a huge festival with more than 20 performance venues, 50 food vendors, hundreds of performers and this year the visitors swelled to over 120,000.
The festival has been running for 28 years and every year lots of work is done to improve the site to cater for all the people.  There are heaps of permanent toilet blocks on the site each with at least 14 cubicles in each one so there were almost never queues.  To me this is a sign of the great planning that has been done in the past.

One of the performers we saw was Mo Kenny a fantastic performer from Nova Scotia Canada.  She has an amazing voice and I was really tempted to buy her album.

Uptown Brown was a one man bad extraordinaire and just one of the many street performers who kept us entertained.

All of the bars are dressed up for the festival.  The orchard bar comes complete with an apple orchard with giant apples.

The orchard bar

And the Pineapple bar is well shaped like a pineapple.

The pineapple bar in the background, you can just see the roof
poking up

We chilled out in the afternoon to the sweet voice of Rachel Sermanni before treking up to the amphitheater to check out a bamboo sculpture that had been built at the festival.

This sculpture was made by a group of volunteers led by Wang Wen-Chih and you can read more about it here.

The sculpture was huge and it was really quite a work of art.

Here is Hubby about to enter the Dome.

And this is looking up inside the dome.

One of the things the festival organisers are working on is re-vegetation of the property.  The festival site used to be a 500 acre farm and so every year trees are planted out after the festival.  The walkway from that car park has been planted out with lots of different types of trees that attract butterfly's and is called the butterfly walk.  And there were lots of butterfly's fluttering around our heads as we walked to the festival each day.  The trees are all sponsored by visitors to the festival and for just $5 you pay for a tree, tree guard and some fertilizer to get the tree started.  There was evidence around the festival of last years sponsored trees.

It seems the wildlife appreciate all the new trees being planted too.  I wonder if they all run for cover when the festival starts up each year or make the most of their free passes to an amazing festival.