Sidmouth Folk Festival
Annual music and dance festival in Sidmouth, England
There has been a folk festival in the coastal town of Sidmouth in South West England in the first week of August every year since 1955, attracting tens of thousands of visitors to over 700 diverse events.
Sidmouth Folk Festival offers a wide range of activities including major folk concerts, pub sessions, workshops and master classes, social dances and dance displays, family entertainment and many children's musical and craft activities. The Late Night Extra feature is also run at Bulverton on the edge of Sidmouth next to the main campsite.
The festival patron is Martin Carthy.
History
Sidmouth Festival was founded as a folk dance festival in 1955 by the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), but gradually expanded to cover ceilidh dancing, music and song, as well as related folk crafts.
Over time, the scope also broadened to include performers from abroad, and the festival was renamed the Sidmouth International Folklore Festival.
From 1986, the festival was managed by Mrs Casey Music, who retitled it Sidmouth International Festival. The festival grew to over 65,000 visitors a year. In 1995 it became the birthplace of Shooting Roots, which provided a variety of workshops for young people and has played a key role in nurturing a network of young performers.
In 2004 the festival celebrated its 50th year.
“Sidmouth Folk Festival” enters the record as annual music and dance festival in Sidmouth, England. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sidmouth, Folk and Festival can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7508885. Authority coordinates are 50.679, -3.235. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1955, 1986, 1995 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sidmouth Folk Festival” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.