Falmouth Sea Shanty Festival
The largest free nautical music festival in Europe. The whole harbour town sings, in pubs and on quaysides, all weekend long.
A proper working harbour town with a Tudor castle on the headland, a station, good food, strong ale, and enough texture in its streets to reward wandering well beyond the waterfront.
Cottages, B&Bs and hotels near Falmouth, Cornwall.
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"A cliff-top open-air theatre carved from Cornish granite above Porthcurno Bay, where productions from Shakespeare to musicals run each summer with the Atlantic as backdrop and Rowena Cade's extraordinary creation as the stage."
Minack Theatre Season
"A sailing regatta with roots going back to 1837, combining competitive racing on the water with a Marching Carnival, live music, and a Pink Wig Parade ashore."
Falmouth Week
"The biggest steam engine rally in Cornwall brings around 70 full-size engines to Stithians Showground for three August days of steam trailer rides, threshing, wood sawing, stone crushing and a Saturday evening sheaf-pitching competition."
West of England Steam Engine Society Rally
"One of Cornwall's largest inland town carnivals, with an illuminated evening procession through the historic streets of Bodmin each August."
Bodmin Carnival
"A colourful summer carnival parade through the surf town of Bude, one of the highlights of the north Cornwall seaside summer calendar."
Bude Carnival
"A charming village carnival in the wooded Helford valley community of Constantine, keeping alive a cherished local summer tradition."
Constantine Carnival
"A working farm field below the silhouette of Corfe Castle. Five stages, four days, and the particular quiet of the Dorset hills when the music stops between sets."
Purbeck Valley Folk Festival
"The Levellers' fiercely independent family festival runs six stages with no sponsorship, a Magic Teapot, folk sessions and a different fancy-dress theme every Sunday."
Beautiful Days
"Free live folk, shanty singing and ceilidh dancing tumble along the seafront of a Jurassic Coast town, anchored by headline concerts at the Marine Theatre."
Lyme Folk Weekend
"A week of music, dance and song for adults of all abilities at England's national centre for folk arts, tucked into a manor in the Quantock Hills."
Halsway Folk Summer School
"Vintage biplanes drone overhead while hard driving bluegrass and old time pickers jam around a bonfire on one of the quirkiest festival fields in the country."
Didmarton Bluegrass Festival
"The biggest dance festival in the UK brings over two hundred Morris and dance performances and fifty plus bands to fill a Dorset seaside town with colour and music."
Swanage Folk Festival