Braemar Folk Festival shortlisted for Scots Trad Music award

The Festival has been nominated as ‘Event of the Year’ (Pic: Amy Muir)

The Festival, which featured Dougie MacLean as its headline act this year, has been nominated as ‘Event of the Year’, sponsored by VisitScotland.

The 20th edition of the Trad Awards will be held at Dundee’s Caird Hall on December 4 and the public can vote for their favourite act or organisation at scotstradmusicawards.com

Braemar Folk Festival was a lockdown brainwave to fill the village with music and celebrate the very best of folk and trad music talent at the start of October each year.

Dougie MacLean at this year's festival (pic:Amy Muir)

In just its second year running, the festival has played host to folk legends like Peggy Seeger, Dougie MacLean and McGoldrick, McCusker and Doyle, besides platforming the best of new folk talent such as Project Smok, BBC Young Trad Musician of the Year Finalists Eryn Rae and Michael Biggins and Northern Irish singer-songwriter Joshua Burnside.

The festival is centred on St Margaret’s Braemar.

Besides the Main Stage concerts at St Margaret’s, there are informal jam sessions in the villages several pubs, workshops throughout the village and live music taking place from breakfast time ’til the wee small hours. Planning is already underway for the next Braemar Folk Festival, being held from 6-8 October 2023.

Festival organiser Fergus Mutch said: “We are absolutely delighted to be nominated as Event of the Year in this year’s Trad Awards.

“It’s testament to our dedicated volunteers, enthusiastic audiences, the whole team at St Margaret’s Braemar and brilliant local partners and sponsors that an event in just its second year running is getting noticed far and wide.

“We’ve been very fortunate to secure some world-renowned performers, and we’re also absolutely committed to supporting new voices in trad music and home-grown talent from right here in Aberdeenshire.

“We’re very proud to have established a great, cosy, autumn music festival – right in the heart of the Cairngorms — which is going from strength to strength and will be back even bigger and better for 2023.”