Three weeks after thousands of music fans descended on Dornoch, the dust has settled on a remarkable weekend that saw the town’s young music festival take another considerable step forward.
Dornoch Music Festival returned on Friday 17 and Saturday 18 July, bringing together major visiting acts, Highland musicians, families, local businesses and community organisations for two days of live music and entertainment.
Perhaps the biggest moment came on Saturday when the festival officially sold out, with 4,000 tickets sold just a year after its first event welcomed a sellout crowd of 1,500.
For the organisers, it proved something they believed from the beginning, that a substantial outdoor music festival does not need to be in a large urban area to succeed when a community gets behind it.
There were memorable performances throughout the weekend, but Tide Lines provided one of the defining moments as the crowd responded to Far Side of the World, while artists travelling to Dornoch included The Wellermen and The Tumbling Paddies.
Some of the loveliest moments happened away from the main stage, with Bad Actress and Harley Moon Kemp giving up their time to visit Dougie’s Dome, help judge the Dornoch Highland Stars competition and perform alongside children and students.
The sight of families and friends sitting together enjoying the music, youngsters discovering instruments and festival goers singing completely different songs during the silent disco captured much of what the organisers had hoped to create.
One of their own most memorable moments came considerably earlier, when the first families walked onto the field on Friday after almost a year spent organising an event that had begun planning just one week after the 2025 festival finished.
There were inevitable challenges behind the scenes, including one potentially serious moment when a band’s booking agent mistook a 16:00 performance time for 6pm, meaning their flight into Inverness would not have arrived in time.
A last minute performance swap kept everything moving and, for those watching from the other side of the stage, there was little indication anything had gone wrong.
There was not much glamour at the nerve centre of the operation either, with the entire festival site managed from a caravan bought around six months earlier for approximately £500 and furnished with dusty old sofas, floral curtains and plenty of passion for the festival.
That slightly homespun character is important because Dornoch Music Festival has no ambition to become an enormous event where audiences are packed together, with the organisers instead hoping it can establish itself as part of the Sutherland and wider Highland calendar.
Keeping the festival affordable and family friendly remains central to that ambition, while more workshops are envisaged and local charities and organisations are being encouraged to become involved.
The organisers also want to continue working with local and Scottish businesses wherever possible rather than simply bringing national suppliers into Dornoch as the event develops.
What happens next remains rather more intriguing.
There has been no announcement confirming Dornoch Music Festival 2027 and no dates for another festival have been revealed.
But three weeks after the last notes rang out across Dornoch, the festival’s Facebook page has been asking its audience a rather interesting question.
Who would you like to see next year?
Watch this space.
