Finish your seaming, gather your skirts, braid feathers in your hair, pick up your bodhran-drum and ready your bagpipes: it’s Castlefest! This yearly returning festival combines historical reenactment, celtic and worldwide folkmusic, pagan spiritualism with a dash of fantasy-literature. I lost count of how often I’ve been there, but two weeks ago was the second time I got to spend the whole weekend there.
We arived friday afternoon. We had meant to arive earlier, but when public transport doesn’t help, there’s no use in stressing. We pitched our tent at the camp site (I dubbed it ‘Toad Hall’).
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| Not toad hall, unfortunately. |
This festival combines a lot of the things I love; music, lots of crafts& DIY, organic food, people in selfmade costumes,history and many, many kind souls. At the festival there is lot’s to see and do, there is are 3 stages for bands to play on plus one stage on which the public itself can have a shot at their one moment of fame. Further more there is a huge market for ready made clothes, supplies such as fabric, leather, buttons etc, hatpins and other jewely and general knick nack and ofcourse the huge reenactment villages in which various reenactors of different time periods show how life was during that period. This year as a first there was an middle-east themed village which was interesting. This all is packed in a beautiful forest near the coast of the Netherlands (which is unfortunately a very long train-ride away from me)
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| Did I mention medieval yarn? |
I did make myself a costume…though due to an insanely busy June and July not as thrilling or extensive as past years or what I imagined it to be back in March. Therefore I wasn’t that excited about it and only wore it one of the four days. Sadly I don’t have any pictures of myself at the festival as my camera died during the festival as in it does still take pictures but the pictures are really out of focus and full of all sorts of colour spots, making it ideal for a 70’s psychedellic photoshoot, but not so much for any other occasion. I have no idea how this happened…as it didn’t get wet or anything (though we, the humans, definately did due to the rain, gosh what a summer is has been right?)
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| See? It’s groovy! |
Anyway I did manage to take some pictures which I hope you’ll enjoy.
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| Who says a festival is no place to relax? |
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| The sign says “Stolen Goods” |
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So these brave knights came to reclaim these goods. (They swear
no innocent farmers or bystanding gypsies were injured, but I’ve
heard other claims….) |
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| The ground below… |
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Thanks for reading
xxx
Nisse
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