When does summer start? It’s a difficult one to answer, is it the first barbeque of the year? The sound of leather on willow?

Personally it’s that feeling of being in a green field, which has been converted into a festival site, with stages, camp sites, traders selling products you really don’t need, and not forgetting food & drink of course.

The honour of seeing in our summer this year was the wonderful Wood Festival, albeit that the day didn’t start too auspiciously, as our Sat Nav decided today was the day it was going to break.

Wood Festival is one of those rare events, where marketing and reality speak as one, it is a small, intimate, environmentally friendly, family festival. From the moment we arrived we felt welcomed, no bag searches or over-bearing security here, the objective was clear, relax, enjoy yourself and that’s exactly what we did. In fact it was so laid back and chilled it was hard to stay horizontal for longer than a few minutes.

Set in the lovely setting of Braziers Park in Oxfordshire the sun shone down - which is always an added bonus even if you had remembered to pack the wellies.

The ratio of children and adults seemed liked 50/50 but in reality there was a few more grown-ups around to supervise the little ones; we would estimate the average age of the children was 10 and under.

An ideal festival to initiate the next generation of festival goers to a safe and friendly environment where children seemed to roam freely, returning to their parents every so often, but always visible to the eye as the main arena area was relatively small and compact.

There was other entertainment on offer other than the music with many talks and workshops including Holistic therapies, making a record player out of cardboard, felt flowers, talks on climate change, Phil Ball from Greenpeace who spent 3 months in jail while working with Greenpeace in the Arctic, jewellery making, love your bike, making instruments from vegetable’s, African and Bodran drumming, and for those who could keep awake until 9pm even a walk through the forest looking for bats!

The Main stage was a wooden construction on a gentle slope that meant if you were 3ft or 6ft tall the stage was always visible and there was plenty of room to pick a good spot. The sets were mainly stripped back and acoustic, including Vikesh Kapoor from America whom even offered one of the front row of children to get on the stage and sing a song. He was quickly taken up by a very young lady who seemed happy to oblige and received a big round of applause.

Knights Of Mentis, who had earlier filmed a song in the forest area, brought us an upbeat set with their music based in roots, folk, country and Americana, and very uplifting it was too.

O’Hooley and Tidow sang song ranging from stories about suicide bombers to real ale as you’d expect. Dreaming Spires played a set before the headliners Sweet Baboo, their line-up includes the Bennett brothers, Robin and Joe, who organise the festival - such is their multi-faceted talent.

The other festival pluses come in the options of food and drink - from hot beverages through to strawberry cider and real ale. Add to that hot stone baked pizza and locally sourced food including chilli, various salad options, fish fingers on the children’s menu, delicious homemade cakes and afternoon tea with real china.

We must also applaud them on their green incentives with homemade toilet compost toilets including one with a ramp for easy accessibility for wheelchair users. The men had a straw bale which concentrates the mind if there’s a wasp about! The hand washing facilities were also hand made using a foot pedal to pump the water through a hose pipe into a sink and even the hand wash was eco-friendly. It’s hard to explain the steam engine looking showers so we’ll just add a picture.

As expected there was recycling bins dotted around keeping the site clean and tidy, and a fine array of solar panels strewn around the site.

As the sun started to set a procession took place before our eyes resembling the pied piper as a 50 plus line of children and adults strolled back to the campsite no doubt leaving the lucky few behind to catch the headline sets.

It did have the feel of a camping holiday as we watched children play board games, adults knit and sketch whilst making the most of all the high quality entertainment laid on for the weekend. No doubt this was a festival where it was easy to make new friends, share in memorable experiences and plan to meet up again the same time and same place next year.

Tickets for 2015 are already on sale as we speak and we can almost hear the phrase “please can we go again next year” ringing in the parents ears.

Should we also mention the lack of mobile devices, tablets etc that children nowadays cannot seem to be parted from, they seemed to be invisible to the human eye? Left at home/in the tent it appeared - so their natural imaginations could be developed as indeed they should.