The Polly Bolton Band: The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I wrote this in 2008 about a memory that was already more than a dozen years old:

Much Wenlock is not just the spiritual home of the Olympics. It also the venue for Festival at the Edge, which I attended a couple of times back in the 1990s.

Although it is chiefly a storytelling festival, my chief memories of it are musical. I heard a young Eliza Carthy play (with Nancy Kerr) and, best of all, I heard the Polly Bolton Band.

That year everything was running hopelessly late, and it was after midnight when the band (Polly Bolton, John Shepherd and Steve Dunachie) took the stage in the marquee. Everyone's breath was steaming in the cold air. The band played traditional folk songs and their own settings of poems by Kipling and A.E. Housman. Above all I remember Polly Bolton's wonderful folk voice.

Now, at last, a recording by the Polly Bolton Band has appeared on YouTube. It's a setting, not of Kipling or Housman, but of a poem by their contemporary W.B. Yeats.