IT started as a one-day event 21 years ago and there’s no doubt the Hexham Gathering has come of age. Bigger and better than ever, the five day long feast of folk music designed to provide a platform for young up-and-coming musicians is now operating across a myriad of venues.

From Tarset in the north to Throckley in the east to Allendale in the south, the hills were alive with the sound of melodeons, fiddles and wonderful voices over the long Bank Holiday weekend.

Co-organiser Chris Pentney said: “The whole reason the festival exists is to provide lots of real performance opportunities for young people who want to play folk music.

“There might be an accordion player at one school and a penny whistle player at another and they don’t necessarily feel they fit in, but they come to the Hexham Gathering and they see hundreds of other young people who love the same thing.

“They see it isn’t weird – it’s dead cool, in fact – and they experience a real affirmation of something they enjoy.”

One of the joys of the festival was seeing people who first came along to the festival as children in the audiences of the 1990s now returning as performers and music teachers.

One of the many examples was Carly Blain, who now mentors the Stocksfield Stompers.

“She used to come along as a young teenager to gigs and now she’s a music teacher and a well-respected performer, too, with the Monster Ceilidh Band.

“Folk music just keeps renewing itself as it’s passed down the generations.”

This year’s Hexham Gathering actually began on Wednesday evening with a ceilidh at Throckley Primary School. It was great to have now partners to work with, said Chris, and to continue extending the geographic area the festival covered.

However, she had to admit to being a little partisan when she said one of her favourite venues was SICA, which just happens to be at the end of her road in Stocksfield.

She is also mother of one of the members of the Stocksfield Stompers, who took part in the talent-packed concert there on Thursday evening. Again, the event bore witness to the next generation on the rise.

She said: “Pupils from Broomley First School took part and they’d written their own song, which they performed with Kat Davidson, who works for the Sage Gateshead, lives in the North Tyne valley and is a fine Northumbrian singer in her own right.

“The children loved being at the concert – they were dancing in their seats to traditional Scottish folk musicians Laura-Beth Salter and John Somerville.”

Some of the bigger names of the festival – young people who are already establishing a name for themselves professionally – included Maz O’Connor, who played at the Hearth at Horsley on Friday night. The singer/guitarist was nominated for the BBC Radio 2 Horizon folk award in 2013.

Robyn Stapleton, current holder of the BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year title, went down a storm in Allendale, while accomplished melodeon and fiddle duo Jim Boyle and Dave Gray demonstrated their rising star quality in Tarset.

“(The lads) are graduates of the Newcastle University folk degree course – we’ve been watching them closely over a number of years now,” said Chris.

Saturday and Sunday belonged to Hexham, though, with the staple ceilidh round the bandstand, the ‘big’ ceilidh at the Wentworth Centre and local home-grown favourites such as Down in the Attic, 4th Generation and Reely Ceol performing at the Queen’s Hall.

The headline names of Eliza Carthy and Tim Eriksen, who have just recorded an album together, and Eliza’s father, the legendary Martin Carthy, took to the main stage for a sell-out concert on Saturday night.

Earlier in the afternoon, they had given a matinee performance free-of-charge for all the young people taking part in the Hexham Gathering, illuminating the road ahead.