What Towersey Festival Has Been: Reflections on the Community Event’s Final Bow After 60 Years

The post What Towersey Festival Has Been: Reflections on the Community Event’s Final Bow After 60 Years appeared first on Consequence .

It’s the moment that your tyres leave the road and your feet hit the grass. The moment that the flags and big-top tents fill the horizon, the sky opens up and your heart stills to a quiet, contented excitement. You are here. You are in The Field. Your festival family arrives and your temporary community builds itself around you. You are once again – and for the final time – in the place where music and stories will fill you: Towersey Festival .

For many in the extended Towersey Festival family, The Field has become the shorthand way of describing the story that is the festival – a tale told across 60 years in the fields of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. This year, the festival’s final chapter was written as the event put on its glad rags for one last, glorious hurrah. Even as the book closes, the cherished memories therein convey why Towersey and events like it are essential parts of the festival community.

Towersey Festival began its life in 1965 as a gathering of friends, family, and performers getting together in a back garden. Its goal? To raise funds for new loos in the community centre of a small Oxfordshire village called Towersey. Over its 60 year lifespan, the festival’s stewardship has been very much a family affair (almost like Dynasty , but with ale instead of oil, songs instead of shoulder pads). It was originally brought to life by Denis Manners MBE and Louis Rushby, who ran it every year until passing the baton to Denis’ son-in-law Steve Heap in 1974. In 2019, the third generation took over by way of Denis’ grandchildren Joe Heap, Kathy Mowatt, and Mary Hodson.

Towersey programming grew out of that back garden and into something extraordinary, introducing generations of festival goers to art and culture from around the globe through a program stretching beyond mainstream offerings. Here you could hear Cajun music, watch traditional clog and sword dancing, and then learn the dance steps yourself from the self-same musicians who’d just performed it. Artists like The Unthanks, Bellowhead, Martin Carthy, Billy Bragg, and longtime Festival Patron Roy Bailey shared space with musicians from Brittainy, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Bulgaria, and several African nations. Entire programs for children and performance spaces like The Nest, where young musicians were supported in developing their own musical traditions, all filled stages with costumes and sounds that introduced a world that transcended the everyday.

Towersey Festival, photo courtesy of Towersey

Beyond music and dance, the festival long cultivated traditions within the Towersey community itself. There were workshops in willow lantern making, and Knit and Natter groups where those experienced in the dark art of yarn passed on their lore to acolytes keen to create crocheted wonders of their own. At this final Towersey Festival, you could try your hand at blacksmithing, wood carving, mediaeval dancing, archery or axe throwing, and even join a choir for the weekend! This was one of Towersey’s loveliest features – filling your day between performances by learning new skills and crafts, all while growing your circle amidst the thousands of attendees.

Like other festivals, Towersey had many moving parts, which it managed to keep in motion by building a community at its heart in a tribe of volunteer stewards. In exchange for a ticket, these vital Towersey faithful were members of the fondly named Towersey Wombles, tasked with the meticulous cleaning of the site; the Loo Crew, who ensured you may never be caught short of loo roll in a campsite; ticket checkers at the gates; and the teams working backstage helping performers. People came back to join the same stewarding teams year after year, growing their friendships and sinking deep roots into their temporary communities.

Many performers and fans have been coming to Towersey from the very start, too, even camping in much the same places around the Festival Green. Marriages have begun at Towersey, loved ones have been mourned, childhoods lived through, and adult experiences launched. My god-child, Alfie, arrived at his first festival at six days old (he’s 17 now); one of the younger Heaps arrived at five days old! When Towersey wrapped its extraordinary community around you, it was for life.

Knowing that I was going to write this, knowing that this was the last Towersey Festival, knowing that I would never see anything quite like this again, I opened my eyes wide to try and see all the other festival families. My experience of Towersey and that of my friends is so profound that I would like to egotistically think it is unique (and if any of them are reading this, then yes, darling, of course it is). But I know that it isn’t, and the truth is that I knew years before my current careful observation. I saw little villages everywhere in this village festival: a tiny village green of gazebos, inflatable goal posts, or a little knot of camp chairs facing in to wrap around the conversation and laughter at its centre. All these people, with their people. Five days a year to feel this grounded, this drenched in music, this dipped in dance, and this safely deposited into friendships that sustain until these five days roll around again.

Because that’s really the heart of community-focused events like this. That’s what grew out of the music and dance and workshops: the love from people who know the best of you, picking up the story you put down last summer and writing a new chapter together whilst soaking up all Towersey had to offer.

Every afternoon of the festival, a lantern making workshop opened to all comers. Willow withies, tape, and tissue paper could become almost anything you wanted them to be over the course of the weekend. Children helpfully added layers of PVA glue and tissue paper to form creations of initially uncertain shape until suddenly they were complete and you cry, “Oh, a Viking ship!” “Oh, a puffin!” The Annual Lantern Parade signalled the final hours of each festival. At the end of the last day, the lanterns were collected by their makers and lit up from within by strings of gossamer fairy lights. A procession set off as the sky darkened, led by pied pipers in the form of melodeons and fiddles (and sometimes cowbells), lanterns held aloft and paraded through the field. There was something riotously pagan about the whole thing.

This year, my daughter created a Cretan angel of protection that was larger than herself. Somehow (by which I mean through great cunning and determination), she found herself right behind the leading musicians, squeaking, “I am at the front! I am at the front!” In that moment, she fulfilled a lifetime’s Towersey ambition, leading hundreds of lanterns to light the festival to its close.

Towersey Festival, photo courtesy of Towersey

Earlier that evening, when day was tipping over into night, dragging the inevitability of the end with it, I found myself at the Bar Stage watching Marc Block at the open mic night. Marc was singing the songs of the beloved festival patron, singer and songwriter Roy Bailey. Roy had a Monday afternoon concert spot every year at Towersey until he could no longer perform. We brought our festival family children to the foot of that stage every single time. We watched his child and grandchild sing with him, we watched our own children line up wearing their random selection of what’s still clean on Monday, augmented with a smattering of what simply had to be purchased on Friday.

On this final night, Marc was singing a favourite of Roy’s, “Everything Possible” – a song, a lullaby, that speaks of such acceptance, of such gentle respect for the wide-arm stretch of humanity. A small child came onto stage, a tiny frame, hair stiff with five days in a field. On stage, he was asked how many Towerseys he had been to. “All of them!” he replied with such confidence. He’s seven years old, so for him, those seven were all of them. Just like it is for so many of The Field children, even the 59-year old-ones, it is the thread through his life.

The young boy sang the last lyrics by himself: “The only measure of your words and your deeds will be the love you leave behind you when you’re gone.”

It was a picture-perfect moment of joy for having seen so much of Towersey and pain at its passing. The measure of Towersey is, after 60 years, how much love it leaves behind. All those families, knitted in love and music. There is so much beauty in communities like this that, even as the Towersey Festival comes to an end, the grandchildren of the founders find they can’t quite put it down – like a perfect marble in their pocket that needs to be rolled one more time.

As the organisers revealed during these final days of Towersey, it is thankfully not quite the end. The story, the love will carry on. Yes, thanks to a community of brands who are keen to support the crucial cause, including ticketing marketplace viagogo , this send off won’t be the final curtain call. Candy Fortescue, Head of Supply and International Ticketing for viagogo said, “The UK is world renowned for its incredible festival season, but we rarely get an opportunity to spotlight and celebrate the historic festivals which paved the way. As one of the oldest UK festivals on record, Towersey has a beautiful legacy, and viagogo is passionate about retaining it for years to come.” In what form that legacy continues is yet to be seen, but we can take comfort that there will still be music, still be dancing, still be workshop — still be a community. Towersey may be ending, but the community lives on. See you there.

This sponsored post created in partnership with viagogo .

What Towersey Festival Has Been: Reflections on the Community Event’s Final Bow After 60 Years
Samantha Hands