WHEN you catch the ferry from Aberdeen in time for the marvellous northerly gathering of musicians that is Orkney Folk Festival, you can expect to hear your first jam on the top deck, and to make the first of many friends in what has become an outstanding celebration of British and international folk music.

You’ll meet them again in the streets, campsites and hostels, and for sure in in the three pubs of Stromness, the Ferry, the Legion and the Royal Oak, that host live music all day, from breakfast to closing time. Many come simply for these extended and convivial sessions and for me, to witness the way 100-plus people in a crowded saloon can fall silent in respect to a single female voice, suddenly inspired to sing, was a thrilling and heart-warming experience, evidence enough of the vitality of this folk tradition and its enduring enchantment for all generations.

The festival itself, while largely based in the small port town of Stromness, reaches out to other islands and community venues across the archipelago with concerts and workshops and, while you couldn't possibly see them all, the reputation of particular gigs spreads quickly through this eager and enthusiastic crowd.

That’s how I learned of a landmark performance in the distant Birsay Community Hall by the delicate and impeccably polite New York blues legend Guy Davis (⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑); and also of a two-hour stomp by the Orkney genre-bending folk-powerhouse The Chair (⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑). For the cognoscenti it was the complex rhythms of Chair songs that filled the bars the next day. For me it was from the account of of a windswept elderly woman whose “bones hurt” from dancing, and yet, seeing that much virtuosity and sheer fun, whose “faith had been restored in humanity.”

That mixture of top-of-the-game folk from home and abroad, with an immediate and eager take up among those attending the festival, is what characterises the programme and somehow mirrors in music the reach of Orkney’s many historical connections: eastward to Scandinavia, westward to Canada and the US, northward to Shetland and the Faroes, and southward to... well, Scotland.

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But for me, as a first-time visitor to the festival, most thrilling of all was how the exhilaration you feel at the beauty of the landscape — its high winds, fierce sunshine, white surf, brilliant greens, deep blues and network of enduring ancient stones and dwellings — is echoed in the music.

The skylarks trill on upward flights like the exuberant whistle of Ali Levack of the  Scottish band Project Smok (⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑), above the rhythmic foundation of Ewan Baird’s throbbing bodhran and Pablo Lafuerte’s guitar. This is contemporary folk that is virtuosic, traditional and yet unlike anything you’ve heard before.

I felt something of the same in the midst of the set played by Dreamers’ Circus (⭑⭑⭑⭑✩), when they interrupted their tight and entertaining brand of Danish folk (including a song that dramatises a passage through alcohol) with the airy and minimal celebration of The World Was Waiting, a delicate foray into serialism, so simple that it becomes an anthem.

Unaccompanied Scottish song — to my amazement — hushed a big audience at Stromness Academy when Scott Gardiner (⭑⭑⭑⭑✩) gave an outstanding rendition of Generations Of Change, the story of four generations of workers in Aberdeenshire, as they move from subsistence farming to becoming oil workers, and beyond even that to the present day.

Finnish six-piece Frigg (⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑), celebrating their 25th anniversary, opened the ears to folk beyond the Celtic mainstream and played with great drama a contemporary music that invites you to understand a new and non-Sibelius way to describe communities, beliefs and a sense of what it is to dance in the Slavic borderlands.

And from Nova Scotia comes a distinctive Scottish-Irish hybrid, along with unexpectedly intricate “footwork,” a kind of cross between step-dancing and tap. It is there in abundance in the somewhat frantic and spectacular showbiz of Nathalie MacMaster, Donnell Leahy and their family (⭑⭑⭑⭑✩), but which for me was best embodied in the endless ability to pile tune on tune of Troy MacGillivray and Mac Morin (⭑⭑⭑⭑⭑). MacGillivray seems to embody an enormous catalogue that can pick at will from either side of the Atlantic, from Orkney jigs to native Canadian reels, and he plays with the natural panache of a folky Grappelli, with a skill honed through a lifetime of ceilidhs. Marvellous.

Alongside all that, it was truly encouraging to walk out of a community concert in Kirkwall cathedral into the remarkable and persistent presence of Orkney’s vigil for Palestine, occupying the public space in the centre of town.

If all this sounds good, then book your hostel in Stromness early, catch that ferry, don't miss the homebrew Dark Island, and be sure to walk the cliffs of Birsay.

Project Smok on tour until October 19. For more information, see: projectsmok.com

Frigg play King’s Place, London, tonight. For more information, see: frigg.fi