Surprise folk festival in St Albans
14 April 2011Last Saturday was a sunny, glorious day. We decided to take a drive, and headed up to the Hawkesbury. We’d spent some time here last year and found it very peaceful and quite remote, despite being not all that far from the city.
Our destination was The Settler Arms in St Albans, an old pub that had a nice, quiet courtyard, their own hand-pumped ale, and good food.
I was therefore quite surprised when we rolled up and saw huge crowds of people, cars, and tents all around the pub. It turns out the St Albans Folk Festival was on that weekend.
This actually worked out very well. We had our beer and our lunch, but were also vastly entertained by the spontaneous concerts that broke out around the pub courtyard. There was a tented, ticketed area where performers put on official shows but it seems the performers were quite happy to practice just about anywhere between sets. You couldn’t turn around without hearing some beardy bloke with a fiddle playing a tune, or tripping over a banjo and guitar session that went on and on. There was even Morris dancing.
It was a great vibe, so we stayed a couple of hours, listening to everything we could. It was an unexpected musical benefit to wat was already a nice driving day.
