Galtres endures the weather and and still put smiles on people's faces

Galtres Festival 2011

Friday 26th to Sunday 28th August 2011
Crayke, near York, North Yorkshire, England MAP
adult £50, child (5-17) £25 family (2a + 3c) £150, adult day ticket £30

Galtres festival celebrated its seventh year with one of the wettest August bank holidays in years. With torrential rain on the Friday and Saturday this could have dampened the spirits. Thankfully a crowd that are attracted to the smaller festivals like this are a hardy bunch and don't let a little mud put them off. In fact they seemed to revel in it at times (seeing a six foot mouse/rabbit bounce around in front of the main stage on a space hopper splashing mud everywhere seemed to sum it up!).

The Galtres festival started out as a beer and cider festival that included local based musicians and has gone through a change over the last couple of years and is now considered more of a music festival that has some great locally produced beers/ciders on sale. I lost count of the choices on offer within the beer tent which was always full of happy, noisy, red-faced adults Â I suppose beer tents are the adults equivalent of a soft play area except without the fruit shoots. Since the transition bands such as The Bluetones, The Lightning Seeds and The Beat have enjoyed headline sets.

The festival was very family friendly and included a small kids area which included story-telling, craft workshops and small rides. The kids ticket also included a free gingerbread decorating voucher, which must have been very popular as when my kids went to use theirs on the Sunday there wasn't any left. Even after dark there were things for the little ones to do as circus performers entertained around a large campfire and they showed kids films in a small cinema tent.

If it hadn't been for the exceptionally muddy conditions then the festival would have been very easy to get around. It is basically a T-shape, with the entrance at one end, the main (The Duke) stage at the other and with the second outdoor stage (The Oxman) being at the base of the T. There were also a further three small indoor stages, The Little Top (cabaret, comedy), The Firkin Stage (open mic slots plus scheduled acts) and The Starshade (storytelling, theatre and drama).

It even had a small carnival area with a few rides and stalls which included a intriguingly named freak show stall entitled 'The strangest thing you'll ever see'. Unfortunately it became 'The strangest thing I've never seen' as it mysteriously disappeared on the Sunday cruelly robbing us of the chance to be amazed. We only had our imagination to guess at what it beheld and the consensus from my daughters was that it was a man who ate his own head. If only we'd gone on the Saturday!

The organisation was good and they got the basics right with plenty of clean toilets with hand wash dispensers outside and enough recycling bins to stop the waste building up. Also security and event staff who were mainly volunteers were polite and helpful.

Galtres is a very green festival which promotes organic and Fair trade foods. They ensure caterers use locally sourced produce where possible. This seemed to enhance the quality of the food which wasn't of the usual festival burger-van standard and included Afro-Caribbean BBQ-style chicken, Paellas, meat and veggie curries as well as a mobile pizza stall that used a traditional wood fired oven. The one downside to the catering was the large queues which were up to forty minutes for the more popular items.

The only real flaws to Galtres was the parking and that it is a cashless tokens only festival. The parking was a shambles with people seeming to park anywhere they could. I'm not sure if this was because the official car parks were getting shut due to the fear of people getting stuck in the mud, or if there just wasn't enough space but I heard of people getting down on the Friday and turning around and going home as they couldn't find anywhere to park.

As for the cashless festival this forced people to buy tokens which could only be bought in packs of ten (£15). This wasn't too bad on the Friday and Saturday but come Sunday night if you'd ran out of tokens and wanted one more drink it would cost you another £15!

Musically Galtres included a huge mix of genres including Blues in the form of The Buccaneers and Chris Helme, Indie including Doyle & The Fourfathers, and Hope & Social, folk (The Men They Couldn't Hang), Punk (Krakatoa) and even Hip Hop (Hungry Ghosts). Most acts were local to the area and the festival helped them showcase their talent to a varied crowd, with many picking up new fans on the way.

The acts alternated between the two main stages so there was always someone on to watch which kept the atmosphere going all the way to the headliners which were British Sea Power on Friday, The Charlatans on Saturday and Levellers who brilliantly brought the festival to a close on Sunday performing their classic 1991 album 'Levelling The Land'.

Overall Galtres was a small enjoyable family friendly festival which had something for everyone. Any festival that can endure weather and mud like that and still put smiles on people's faces will surely have many more successful years.