A music festival hosted in the heart of the Abbey Ruins has been cancelled this year.

The cancellation is the second in three years after Coronavirus postponed organiser Heavy Pop’s 2020 concerts.

As a result of pandemic rescheduling, the company condensed three of its festivals into the last eight months making Down at the Abbey 2022 ‘unsustainable’.

A spokesperson for the organisers said: “The last few years have been incredibly challenging for our small team.

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“We were extremely happy to be able to deliver Down at the Abbey last September, albeit in very testing circumstances; and to witness the joy from the audience returning to us gave us tremendous satisfaction.

“As a result of pandemic related rescheduling, Heavy Pop have now produced three festivals in just the past eight-month period. Not only were we working on a condensed and accelerated delivery programme that stretched us to our limits, but it was also a highly uncertain period.

“This, combined with the current cost of living crisis, has brought us to realise that in order to protect the long-term sustainability of Heavy Pop as a company and our festival events, Down at the Abbey and Are You Listening?, we now need the summer period to reflect and reset, and get back to our more workable planning cycles for our 2023 events.

“Down at the Abbey 2022 will no longer be going ahead as a result; our staff and partners have fully supported this decision for the long-term outlook. We hope you will too.

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“We are a completely independent local event company, and we depend on your continued support. If you can, we kindly ask that you keep your existing tickets, which will be automatically rolled over for Down at the Abbey 2023 taking place on the weekend of Sep 9th, 2023.

“If you are not able to do this, we fully understand, and you are entitled to receive a full face-value refund for your tickets. Gigantic, our ticket partners will contact all ticket holders shortly and they will process any refund requests. For those wishing to keep their tickets and join us at next year’s festival, no further action is required.”