Showers did little to slow a crowd that moved from attentive afternoon listening to full-throated singing, dancing and a Skerryvore finale, as The Gathering returned to Inverness with Dàna, Kim Carnie, Valtos, Talisk, Torridon and Beluga Lagoon.
The Gathering returned to Northern Meeting Park for its seventh year, bringing Scottish music, food, drink and family entertainment back into the centre of Inverness. It is a festival with a clear sense of place, rooted in Highland culture but broad enough to bring in audiences from across the region and beyond.
Ahead of the event, Claire Clark from The Gathering Festival said it had always been about “celebrating the best of Scottish music and culture”. That idea also came through when Skerryvore spoke to IGigs before the festival, describing The Gathering as “an ideal fit” for a band always trying to push their sound forward while keeping traditional roots in their musical DNA. With that in mind, 2026 arrived with a simple promise: a day built around where Scottish music has come from, and where it is still heading.
Across the park, the day had the busy, lived-in feel The Gathering does well. Families drifted between music, food and drink, friends found each other between showers, and the CALA-supported play area gave younger festivalgoers, including our very own Meredith, their own part of the day. That matters. The Gathering works because it is not just a line-up dropped into Inverness, but a festival that seems to understand the city around it.
Recently crowned Up and Coming Artist of the Year at the 2025 MG ALBA Scots Trad Music Awards, Dàna carried that promise lightly. They were not the first act on, but they were certainly a good point to start our Gathering journey for 2026.
The crowd listened, and the four-piece rewarded that attention with intricate jigs, subtle arrangements and a luxuriousness that ran through the set. “The Crown Range”, introduced as their first release, sat neatly inside that early sense of promise, while a slower piece was introduced by the band asking us to be “trees floating through the storm”. With Belladrum and Under Canvas still to come, Inverness will be seeing them again soon.
Warmth, voice and presence shaped Kim Carnie’s Main Stage set, with the crowd charmed from the off and held throughout. After ten days on tour, she opened with two new tracks that already felt fully formed, folding Gaelic roots, story-led atmosphere and a little soul into the set.
There was playfulness too, from talk of love potions and digging up dead men’s bones to a surprise cover of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”. Even the tea cup between songs added to the charm, while her voice remained the thing everything gathered around. It was the kind of set that suited The Gathering’s afternoon mood: relaxed, generous, and quietly magnetic.
The day’s first real jolt came with Valtos. With the drizzle settled over the park, they gave The Gathering a change of direction, turning the Main Stage from attentive festival crowd into something closer to a club tent.
High-octane and trad-electronic, they made the shift feel immediate. The crowd responded, with Lana Pheutan’s vocals adding lift across the set and helping make “Running Into the Night” hard to resist. “Etive” may be their closest brush with going viral, Dannii Minogue approval included, but live they did not need the internet to prove the point. In the middle of a grey Inverness afternoon, they gave the park a proper kick forward.
Rather than easing off, Talisk picked up the energy Valtos had left hanging and pushed it harder. They mentioned time spent recording a new album and dropped in new material, but this was less about spotting individual tracks than feeling the whole set move as one rush.
Big bass, electronics and sheer speed gave it the feel of a festival rave, with the Main Stage momentum never allowed to dip. At the centre of it all was Mohsen Amini, his concertina driving the set with ridiculous force and precision. By the time they signed off with “We’ve been Talisk, you’ve been amazing”, it felt playful, breathless and completely earned.
By early evening, Torridon had pulled the biggest pre-gathered crowd of the day so far, and Inverness knew exactly what was coming. Kenny’s sparkly kilt gave the set extra flash, while the Inverness Thistle tops in the crowd and shout-outs to local secondary schools made it feel properly rooted in the city.
Highland rock is probably the neatest label, but the real strength was how quickly the set moved. The originals showed accomplished songwriting, “Lighthouse” carried its men’s mental health message with weight, and the onstage antics kept things loose. It flew by, landing exactly where The Gathering works best: Scottish music with a Highland accent, played to a crowd that already felt part of it.
Then came a more curious turn from Beluga Lagoon, one that did not fall neatly into line after the rush of Valtos, Talisk and Torridon. Bird sounds through the PA set up an intriguing contrast, before the eight-piece version of the band gave the set a fuller shape than the solo project might suggest.
There was still plenty to dance to, smile at and get immersed in, with “Isla” and its “Hickety pickety bumdy bum” refrain catching the playful side of it. More than anything, Beluga Lagoon showed how cinematic folk can stretch The Gathering’s trad banner into wider places. That breadth is one of the festival’s strengths: it can hold the familiar and the stranger edges of Scottish music without making either feel out of place.
As headliners, Skerryvore closed The Gathering like a band who knew exactly why they were there. After more than 20 years of building from pubs and village halls into one of Scotland’s biggest live exports, their headline slot felt properly earned, and the biggest crowd of the night seemed to have arrived ready for that lift.
Early on, their World Cup song caught the mood neatly: not novelty patriotism, but the cautious ambition Scotland songs have carried before, closer in spirit to Del Amitri’s self-aware football anthem than blind optimism. With the band preparing to head to the States to cheer on Scotland and catch a game, it landed in the moment. Elsewhere, the guitars and scale gave the set a real rock edge, but the ceilidh instinct was still there underneath. That is why Skerryvore fit The Gathering so naturally. They carry the same balance the festival had been building all day: rooted but not stuck, Highland in spirit but broad in reach, capable of turning tradition into something big enough for a wet Inverness crowd to sing back at the top of its voice.
They were the obvious choice to close it. The Gathering had spent the day moving between the delicate, the playful, the traditional and the downright loud, and by the time the rain had eased and the crowd was drying off, Skerryvore gathered all of that up. There were tunes, big choruses, rock guitars, football hopes and that old festival trick of making a crowd feel bigger than the day it had come through. By then, nobody needed the point explained. Inverness was still singing.
By the end, what lingered most was not just the strength of the line-up, but the way The Gathering held together as a day. The showers came and went, sometimes more than politely, but the crowd kept moving with it. Parents, pals, dancers, trad heads, casual wanderers and waterproofed loyalists all seemed to find their own version of the festival somewhere between the stage, the food stalls and the familiar faces.
That is why The Gathering feels vital. It is not trad as one fixed thing, but Scottish music in motion: delicate, playful, loud, local, communal and proudly Highland when it needs to be. Across the stages, and across a park that never quite let the weather win, Inverness once again gave the festival its pulse.
While nothing has been officially announced yet, we are already looking forward to what The Gathering 2027 brings.
There’s a complicated web related reason why we dont have many picture on the website just now, but they have found a home on Facebook for now
