Belladrum festival bosses say site can cope with record numbers
- Published
The Hot House has replaced the Garden Stage as Belladrum's main arena
Organisers of the Belladrum music festival insist they can cope with increased crowd numbers despite long waits to get onto the site.
Traffic delays of five hours were reported on the last few miles to the event near Beauly on Thursday.
A record number of about 25,000 tickets were sold for the Highlands' biggest annual music festival.
But bosses say that was not behind delays in getting people through the gates on the opening day.
Event organiser Dougie Brown said the site, which is about a 30-minute drive from Inverness, was "more than capable of dealing with the capacity increase".
He told BBC Radio Scotland's Lunchtime Live programme: "Today has been perfect for arrivals and everyone has been straight on site.
"But obviously yesterday was a hugely disappointing start to the festival and something that we're all quite upset about and wish things had gone a bit smoother.
"It's something that we'll have conversations about, but the scale that we went up for shouldn't and wouldn't have had those effects on its own - that's the reality."
There were long queues on Thursday night near Belladrum
Mr Brown said wet weather on the two previous nights and large numbers of people arriving early had resulted in the long queues of traffic.
"We also seem to have more people travelling with maybe one or two people in the car, rather than our historic data which shows 2.8 people per car on average," he said.
"All those things combined made it a snowball which just got carried away and made it very difficult for us to recover from."
The Garden Stage had previously hosted some of the festival's biggest acts
He said event bosses would seek to avoid a similar situation next year, when Belladrum celebrates its 20th birthday.
"Obviously we do a lot of data on our car parks, camp sites and spaces on our site from last year and the site is more than capable of dealing with the capacity increase that we had," Mr Brown said.
"We will definitely be looking at it, but there are various other factors that we, along with police and other agencies, need to get into over the next couple of weeks."
Fran Healy of Saturday night's headliners Travis
Music fans who did make it in on time to see Thursday's headliner - Norwegian singer-songwriter Sigrid - praised the performance and new main stage set-up.
The Hot House stage, which is set in a natural bowl in a field, is now the main venue instead of the Garden Stage, where numbers were sometimes restricted due to the area being a former walled garden.
Other acts over the weekend include British indie pop band Bastille and Scottish rock band Travis, who will play the main stage on Saturday night.
Mr Brown said: "The atmosphere is incredible. The sun is out...and everyone is in great form. We're all positive now.
"We've got two more days to go and we're just looking forward to the rest of the acts."
Belladrum 'toons and tunes
Punk Rock Factory on the main Hot House stage
After the stop-start crawl of Thursday's long traffic queues, Belladrum stepped up a gear on Friday.
The sun was out and the forecasted afternoon thundery downpours failed to materialise.
Crowds of people milled between the different stages - cheering on wrestlers in the Venus Flytrap big top, gawping at stunt cyclists' antics or taking in Edinburgh band Broken Records at the Garden Stage.
Cartoons is the theme for this year's festival, and a few folk had made the effort to dress-up - including a family in Spider-Man and Supergirl outfits.
A giant inflatable Spider-Man is on site to tie in with Bella's cartoons theme
And late afternoon main stage act Punk Rock Factory could not have been a more appropriate choice for this year's line-up of acts.
They performed the theme tune to Spongebob Squarepants and tunes from Disney animated films Frozen and Moana, all in a punk style.
But the South Wales band got their biggest reaction trying something a bit different from their usual TV show and Disney-themed sets - a punk version of The Proclaimers' I'm Gonna Be (500 miles).