FOR a music festival largely powered by solar panels, the weather could not have been better.

Clear skies and temperatures hitting 27C was a perfect start to the third Wood festival, as families, folkies and eco-warriors descended on Brazier’s Park near Wallingford.

Launched as a greener, family-friendly sister to the long-running Truck festival, it is one of the few summer music events where as much emphasis is placed on building bat boxes, hedgehog homes and wormeries as listening to live music.

Headlined this year by Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan, experimental folk sextet Tunng and punk artist Frank Turner, weekend tickets this year sold out for the first time since it was founded in 2007.

Attracting mainly a local crowd, many of whom cycled or took public transport to the venue, a series of afternoon workshops introduced first-timers to yoga, community singing or making wallets from orange juice cartons in between the live music.

Isla Miskelly, a spokesman for organisers Robin and Joe Bennett, said: “This feels like the festival’s first year, in the sense we have got it right. It has been a different set-up, but it feels like this is the way it should continue.

“We have had perfect weather, a perfect atmosphere, happy crowds and great bands. It could not have gone any better.”

Twins Jacob and Zac Garby, eight, from Temple Cowley, in Oxford, were visiting their first festival.

Mum Helena, 46, said: “We thought last year they were a bit young, but now they are that bit older and they love it. They have had a great time.

“They have made musical instruments this morning and watched a few bands.

“One of their highlights has been having a poo on compost while looking out over the trees.

“Everyone is really friendly. Everyone has got kids, so it is like a community. It is an alternative Butlins, I suppose.”

Even three-month-old Oskar Benson seemed to enjoy the day, having been kitted with earphones to protect his hearing by parents Tom and Outi Benson, who live on a houseboat in Oxford.

Ms Benson, 37, said: “It’s Oskar’s first festival, so there are lots of bright things to look at and lots of kids to find and take interest in.”