Hope House. Thank you.

Thanks to the generosity of our festival goers, we raised thousands of pounds at this year's event to fund music therapy for children with life limiting illnesses who attend the Hope House Hospice in Shropshire.

As those of you who came to the West Mid showground on Sunday will know, volunteers from the hospice were outside the two marquees after the afternoon concerts collecting with buckets - and boy, did you fill them! Painstaking counting revealed a massive £1,054 was raised via the collection and a further £130 from the collecting tins dotted around the site over the weekend.

When we made our fundraising commitment to Hope House we agreed to donate a proportion of our tickets sales - we are still totalling up, but we already know it will be in excess of £3,000!

Some of us committee members were lucky enough to get the chance to visit Hope House and see the work it does and we have no doubt that every penny you donated will make a real difference.

Many of the children at Hope House have limited speech, learning difficulties or a severe disability and music is a great outlet for them. It costs around £8,000 - all of which has to come from the £3.5 million the charity has to raise each year - and thanks to our wonderful visitors we can now fund over half the cost.

So thank you from everyone at Shrewsbury Folk Festival and at Hope House - we'll fill you in on the final total as soon as we know it!