THE Boondocks Festival, Malmesbury’s popular home-grown music event, will not be returning next year.

Event organisers have said they are taking a year off from the project after having hosted the festival for the past two years out of crowd-sourced funding.

One of the festival founders, Neil Muttock, said: “Running the festival requires a huge amount of work for all the organisers.

“It’s run voluntarily so it’s a really big ask of the people involved to commit to doing it.

“Also, the festival only just breaks even and it’s likely to become more expensive each year so we need to figure how best to keep it going.

“We will need to either increase the ticket price, sell more tickets or find some external funding from grants or sponsors.

“But we would like to keep the festival small with an accessible ticket price so external funding is our preferred option.”

Neil has insisted the festival, which raised more than £30,000 in a couple of weeks from residents to fund this year’s event, says Boondocks will be back in 2018.

He continued: “Whatever happens we are determined to come back in 2018 with some fresh new ideas so you can all see the event evolving into something even more special.

“We realise this may be disappointing news but we really feel it’s a good time to refresh ourselves and take stock to make sure the event continues.

“A big thank you to all of you who have supported Boondocks and got it off the ground with us.”