Festival celebrating Grantown's past gets underway
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Visitors and town folk will literally have designs on Grantown for the next week as the capital of Strathspey celebrates its architecture.
As well as buildings and plans, the Grantown 250 festival will feature both its own history and its vibrant present.
Exhibitions of crafts and skills and “the weird, wonderful and wacky show” – a community tribute to unusual, innovative and interesting designs - also feature.
Grantown is a Georgian 18th Century planned town.
It has been desribed by Professor Thomas Smout, Scotland’s Historiographer Royal, as one of the best preserved and most interesting of all 500 or so planned settlements north of the border.
The festival programme includes a tour of other planned villages, Tomintoul, Dufftown, Aberlour and Archiestown and a presentation and workshop on Grantown’s conservation area .
Tomorrow (Thursday) there will be guided walks around Victorian and Georgian Grantown and in the evening a fabulous historic pub crawl, departing from the Royal British Legion at 8pm.
Throughout the coming week there is an exhibition of photographs highlighting architectural features.
Grantown’s three churches will be open to enable visitors to admire their special architectural features.
Meanwhile Grantown’s award winning museum will tell the story of the town's origins and an interactive exhibition entitled “People and Place” will illustrate its development.
The history of the town will further be highlighted with the historic Figgat Fair and the regality procession marking the transfer of power from old to new Grantown.
Central to that will be a picnic in the gardens of Grant House with music from Black Isle Jazz.
Music will be a key part of the festival with the “Fiddler of Strathspey” festival on Saturday morning, the highly acclaimed River concert in the evening, followed by a Scots Ceilidh Night, Georgian Ball and a choral evening.
High Streets shops will join in with costumes and displays, the community centre will become a Victorian Tea Room and the Ben Mhor a Georgian Tavern.
Bill Sadler, the festival organiser, said: “This is very much a community festival, funded entirely by the community and totally run by volunteers of whom the costume group deserve special mention.
"Despite adversity this is a fantastic event at which we can learn from the past and build for the future."
The full programme of events can be seen at www.grantown250.org
