SUE WILSON caught the Sunday action on the designated folky day

THE WEATHER had thankfully shifted to a milder direction by the Insider's final day: though it was largely sunny all weekend (and the wellies went home unworn), a prevailing northern airstream had sent temperatures plummeting to smoky-breath depths on Friday and Saturday night, such that the bonfires dotted around the site were rivalling the bands as the main attraction.

But come Sunday the chilling out was purely figurative rather than also literal, and many of those who'd previously demurred on a dip in the Spey – which ran alongside the festival's luxuriantly spacious camping area – could be seen walking back to their tents, dripping but beatifically refreshed.

While the programme overall was a model of freewheeling grassroots eclecticism, Sunday had been designated the main day for folk acts – but even here this entailed hardly any narrowing of parameters, taking in Americana-hued acoustic pop from Denmark's Claes Cem, the John Langan Band's magpie-minded mix of Celtic, world, prog and gospel sounds, and a trip back in time with the Incredible String Band's Mike Heron, latterly rediscovered by the skinny-jeaned generation as a forefather of nu-folk.

One of that genre's few genuinely substantive stars, Alasdair Roberts, also put in an appearance, beguiling the late-afternoon audience with his potently understated blend of traditional ballad idioms, intensely felt songcraft and learned allusion.

Definite potential stars in the making (although far too lively and tuneful ever to be dubbed nu-folk) are the Highland five-piece Abagail Grey, centred on the deceptively catchy, piano-based songwriting of Claire Campbell, and also featuring harps/vocals duo The Duplets, aka Gillian Fleetwood and Fraya Thomsen, plus trumpet, fiddle, guitar, bass and drums. The songs' melodic and harmonic vibrancy was deftly offset by darker, disquieting undercurrents, be it in Campbell's piquant, angsty phrasing and mordant lyrics, or the subtly discordant colours woven through the arrangements.

In a more familiar or conventional folk vein, the main-stage line-up was rounded off by a triple header of top current Scottish talent – although there's little that's actually conventional about Macmaster/Hay's compellingly stripped down yet ultra-sophisticated amalgam of live percussion grooves, electro-harp melodies and alternately stark/sweet vocals, other than their material's traditional sources.

In amongst material from their excellent debut album Love and Reason, an extra treat was a poignantly sparse, sensitive new version of that notoriously demanding classic, Elvis Costello's 'Shipbuilding'.

Setting us off on the home straight were Charlie McKerron & Friends, the Capercaillie fiddler being a resident on the Inshriach estate, whose designated pals here combined Session A9 bandmates with members of the Treacherous Orchestra: fellow fiddler Adam Sutherland, guitarist Marc Clement, flautist Bo Jingham and Ross Ainslie on pipes and whistles.

With McKerron still in the process of celebrating his half-century birthday, the result was a suitably fiery set of densely layered instrumentals, plus the odd complementary ballad from Clement, before Dàimh took the stage and pumped up the volume yet further, again pulling off their familiar yet still uncanny trick of matching rigorously intricate precision with all the force of a full Highland rampage, tempered at intervals by Calum Alex MacMillan's soulful Gaelic singing.

© Sue Wilson, 2010

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• Sue Wilson