The Swaledale Festival takes place over two weeks in May and June each year, in churches, chapels, castles, ‘Literary Institutes’, pubs, fields and village halls scattered around Swaledale, Arkengarthdale and Wensleydale. The largest venues seat about 400 people; the smallest venues as few as 40. The main focus of the Festival is on small-scale classical chamber music. Choral music, folk music, brass bands and jazz also feature, as do talks, films, exhibitions, poetry readings, workshops and guided walks. The 2014 Festival featured Royal Northern Sinfonia, Natalie Clein, Nicholas Daniel, Don Paterson, Emma Johnson, Martin Taylor, Martin Simpson and the Navarra Quartet, among others. In 2011, the Festival was described by The Guardian as one of the 10 best classical music festivals, and by the Daily Telegraph as one of the 25 opera and classical festivals of the season. The Guardian again featured the Festival in its 2012 and 2013 Festival Guides, in a short list which included Aldeburgh, the BBC Proms, Bath, Cheltenham and Glyndebourne. The Festival attracts around 7,000 visitors a year. A key feature of the Swaledale Festival is the commitment to new commissions and recently composed works; commissioned pieces by Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, Michael Brough and Heather Fenoughty received their premières in 2012, and the 2013 Festival included premières of works by Sally Beamish, David Blake, Stephen Goss, Tim Garland, Roland Dyens and Graham Coatman. Early history The early history of the Swaledale Festival is in several strands, which merged in the 1980s. The Richmondshire Festival The biennial Richmondshire Festival was founded in 1965 by Dr A J Bull, the retired music organiser for the North Riding of Yorkshire. A week of music and drama in and around Richmond, it was initially scheduled for September in order to attract motorists on their way south from the Edinburgh Festival. Musical highlights of the first Richmondshire Festival included a recital at Aske Hall by the Melos Ensemble, with Gervase de Peyer, Cecil Aronowitz and Emanuel Hurwitz, and a concert at the County Modern School by the Northern Sinfonia Orchestra, as it was then known. There were also performances by local school, amateur and scratch groups, tea-dances, talent contests, and military bands beating the retreat. The 1967 Richmondshire Festival programme lists Arthur Bull as the "Hon. Organiser", and the Marquess of Zetland as Patron. There are no known records for the next decade. In 1969 the Richmondshire Festival moved