the girvan tattie fest
2025
8 foot farmer!
In 2025, we held a schools’ artwork competition which was open to all schools in the KA26 district. The McKechnie agreed to exhibit the work in one of the upstairs rooms for the four-week period spanning the festival. Judging took place during this time and the winners were announced at the Girvan Tattie Fest. A huge thank you to Land Energy for their sponsorship of the Tattie Fest Schools Art Competition!
We also worked with some of the farmers in the Girvan Early Growers (GEG) collective to get the children in the Girvan primary schools growing tatties so that they could learn about the crop and experience growing, harvesting, and cooking food (farm to fork). GEG provided the most amazing growing kits for the schools which included special grow bags, compost, fertiliser, seed potatoes, and instructions. We are truly indebted to GEG for facilitating this great experience for the children. We worked with the Girvan Youth Trust to create a new Tattie Topping competition for the teenagers to allow them to get creative. All of these activities were in their first year and will be developed further for future years.
The parade was a little different this year, we were joined by the amazing giant Tatties from Crag, an eight-foot farmer from the circus, our RAF cadets, and a beautiful Clydesdale horse called Alfie from Blackstone Clydesdales. Biosphere Bikes joined in with their trishaw and replica (but electric!) old fashioned delivery bike. We managed to get a volunteer piper to play as we marched. However, when news got out that he would be playing, we received a further six requests to join in from another piper and five drummers – suddenly, we had a band! These seven used to belong to the Girvan & District Pipe Band which had not played for at least 10 years. When these seven volunteers got together for the parade, they enjoyed it so much that they are currently reforming the old band and at the moment have 12 members who have started meeting and practising together – all because of Tattie Fest! They have their first gig on 2nd August – what an amazing outcome!
The Festival Village became larger this year with the introduction of Baby Big Top and the circus skills workshops and shows. Both the shows and workshops were free to all to attend, these turned out to be hugely popular, encouraging more families to the festival. It is something we definitely want to bring back again next year – hearing the laughter and applause of the children was just heart-warming.
By working closely with the Girvan Youth Trust, we have created activities that will encourage younger members of our community to join in. We even held a focus group with some of the town's teenagers to understand what they would like included, and over the next few years, we will be building on this. Biosphere Bikes joined us for the first time this year to bring their trishaw along for free rides along the prom for people who'd love to cycle but can't. They also opened their hub on the shore front to provide bikes to all. The ever-popular UnderSky returned to provide educational outdoor games to children, and we brought our big marquee with the much-loved floor curling lane which the children absolutely adore (we did all squash up a bit when the rain came on so that UnderSky could have indoor games instead!!). AYE Girvan and Crag Community Arts both had gazebos to bring art activities and face-painting for the children. The Girvan Story Project team joined us (they are working on the regeneration of areas in Girvan) and they brought one of their traditional skills workshops (making stained glass) so that people could try their hand at it, as well as being able to update the community on how their project is progressing.
Unfortunately we were hit by torrential rain for most of the day. Several stallholders and activity providers didn’t attend the event because of weather warnings. We also couldn’t have the various beach games that had been planned. However, feedback from stallholders, community groups and those who attended was really positive, we'll be ready for whatever the weather throws at us in 2026!
What The Tattie Fest 2025 Achieved
This year we achieved even more inclusion of other local groups and organisations, working together to grow the festival and embed other groups and organisations as part of the festival for the years ahead. We negotiated our first financial sponsorship, the aim being to grow involvement of and sponsorship from the larger employers in our area. We accidentally helped get the Girvan Pipe Band back together!! This will be a great boost for the area, allowing other organisations easy access to a local Pipe Band for their own events. We're thrilled the Girvan Pipe Band is now in place to lead the parade for the unfurling of the new Girvan flag at the Girvan Harbour Gala! The group that run The Wave Hub organised their own Tattie Morning on the day of the Tattie Fest, with Tattie based activities for children and families, a fringe event to support the Tattie Fest. We brought in the Circus as a free but bookable experience, this helped increase the awareness of the festival, causing a word of mouth increase. In spite of the horrendous weather the Tattie Fest was another overall success. Here's to Tattie Fest 2026, its 5th Anniversary!
2024
After the 2023 festival and following discussions with the Scottish Community Tourism Organisation (SCOTO) and Destination South Ayrshire, GoGirvan was tasked with growing Tattie Fest into a much larger community festival by increasing participation and raising its profile both locally and nationally to develop the event (potentially) into an important fixture in Scotland's cultural calendar. Plans were drawn up by a small sub-group of representatives (led by GoGirvan) from local business, interested stakeholders, and community groups to create a festival that would be broad enough to provide a wonderful family afternoon for our community, celebrating our culture and heritage, involving other community groups and organisations, and creating diverse opportunities for local volunteers to work for the community. A community festival that would be put on by the community, for the community.
The Tattie Fest subgroup decided that we would start our expansion of the festival in 2024’ s event and consolidate what we learned from that to grow 2025’s event. Unfortunately, we had very little time to work with for the 2024 event and, by the time we had to submit our application for the Awards for All funding, the planning was less detailed than hoped for. A rough plan with estimated costs was included in the application.
We were absolutely delighted at the end of March 2024 to be told that our application for £9,700 had been successful – it had been difficult to hold off from ordering and purchasing anything, but in April, we received the money, and the floor curling equipment was ordered from the manufacturer in Canada as it was on a long lead time. Fingers were crossed!!
The parade was also time-critical to organise – we needed four weekends for the series of workshops to run in which the children would design and build their costumes with the help of the artists at Crag Community Arts. The calls went out on Facebook and posters went up in the town. The artists were also working on refurbishing the original giant Tattie (Tattie-ana which had been used in the Tattie Fests of 2022 and 2023) and a new giant Tattie was being built to accompany her – they now had regal status (Queen Tattie-ana and her King Tatt!). The artists were also going to hold a hand-printed banner workshop on the morning of the festival. Useful for two reasons: we needed banners, and what a great way to get them made (the children loved it) and also, it meant the children would be at the venue and ready for the parade on the day - who knew artists were so cunning! It was certainly all hands to the pump at the Wee School Community Arts Space.
We also approached the Girvan Community Garden (who were putting on live music in their venue). They agreed to put on some tattie-based food on the day so that there would be some tattie dishes. We also came to an agreement with them regarding the toilet facilities which they were hiring in (we would cover 50% of the costs), and so we agreed to pay £500 to help them convert their fringe event to a main event and provide the extras we needed.
At our AGM in early May, we were joined by some new Trustees on the Board and we signed up some new members. Many were keen to volunteer and help out where they could. At GoGirvan, we found out that erecting gazebos at 7:30 am on a drizzly Saturday morning is a real team-building experience - taking them down again at the end of a very long tiring day is just difficult! We’d remember that for the 2025 planning.
The afternoon of the event day finally came. The rain that had started the day died away and the sun came out. Dowhill farm brought us a sack of tatties to sell on our stall, the parade made its way through the town – we were joined by the alpacas from Little Peru who just love to trek, the curling was really popular and families queued up to take their turns, UnderSky ran tattie & spoon races and tattie sack races, AYE Girvan painted faces and gave everyone amazing (fake) tattoos, the giant Tatties posed for photos, the giant kites flew high above Girvan beach and Active Schools showed us all how to play beach volleyball. It was just a wonderful family-oriented afternoon.
What the 2024 Tattie Fest Achieved
Twelve volunteers worked really hard to put on a great afternoon for everyone who attended. In the first two years of Tattie Fest, less than 400 people came to each event. In 2024, we estimated there were over 900 visitors. Our Town Ambassadors (who joined us for the event) and our Tourist Information Point volunteers spoke to as many people as they could and found out that a lot of people had actually come into town from the villages specifically for Tattie Fest. That was great news to know that we were appealing to the wider community in KA26. All in all, we had certainly achieved our aim of growing the festival – both in terms of activities and in numbers of people attending. We had also involved several community groups and organisations to help: Crag Community Arts, the Girvan Community Garden, AYE Girvan, Girvan & District Attractions, the Tourist Information Point and the Town Ambassadors. We had grown the capacity capability of the festival by moving it outdoors (on the green between Louisa Drive and the beach, which would open it up for further expansion in subsequent years). We had also grown its appeal to a wider range of people by including activities for families and a whole array of fringe activities.
All in all, the 2024 festival was a great success considering the huge changes and level of growth achieved in such a short space of time. The afternoon was enjoyed by a large number of people from our community, not just from Girvan, but from the villages outwith our town. The children absolutely loved the floor curling lane, UnderSky (and their amazing educational games), AYE Girvan (face painting and pretend tattoos), Little Peru and their beautiful alpacas. The giant kites from the Kite Club of Scotland made a popular return to Girvan (they hadn’t flown in our skies for a great many years). The parade had been a great success, and it was lovely to see the wee ones dressed in costumes that they had made during the workshops. The banner workshop on the morning of the festival certainly did the trick – a lot of children joined the parade, and it was wonderful to see the hand printed banners waving in the air as we made our way along the streets.
It wasn’t just the day itself when people benefitted from Tattie Fest. By including our volunteers in the planning stages, they threw themselves into the preparations, came up with brilliant ideas, and formed new friendships. Two of the volunteers created a wonderful ‘7- Day Count Down to Tattie Fest’ series of Facebook posts where they photographed a crocheted tattie hiding in iconic places around the town. We had such a great response to this as everyone posted their ideas on where the wee tattie was hiding each day. It was a really inspired idea, and this was just one example of how involved the volunteers became.
In 2024, we took a tiny community festival that could not have expanded at all (because of limitations on the capacity of the venues used) and grew it to a much larger event along the sea front. We could not have done this without the help of the Awards for All funding – it enabled us to make a large change happen in one year. It is a shame that we could not tell the world about it at the time due to a general election having been called in early July. But, in order to make maximum use of the £9,700 funding award, we decided to take advantage of the two-year deadline to spend the funding (there was £2,474.16 remaining) as we knew we could make further improvements to the festival to get closer to our aims for this event - and so we started planning the
Girvan Tattie Fest 2025 accordingly.