After two days of thunderstorms, evacuations, biblical rain and enough mud to make every pair of cowboy boots on site question their life choices, Sunday morning delivers something The Long Road Festival has been waiting all weekend for. The weather holds.
No running for shelter. No nervously checking the sky between songs. No photographers desperately trying to keep cameras dry. For the first time all weekend, Stanford Hall can simply get on with being a country festival, and with Maren Morris, Emmylou Harris, Kezia Gill, Ryan and Rory, The Felice Brothers, Anne Wilson, Jim Lauderdale and plenty more still to come, there is a lot to squeeze into the final day.
The Long Road Festival 2026
There is also a familiar face with some unfinished business. Liam Price has spent Saturday gathering people around a rain-soaked VIP Stage, but he has already told me where his attention really is. Sunday means the Rhinestone Stage.
Having earned his opportunity at The Long Road Festival by winning the festival’s competition the previous year, this is the moment he has been working towards. The Rhinestone Stage is a very different proposition from the smaller stages around Stanford Hall. It is enormous, exposed and there really is nowhere to hide, particularly when you are the artist tasked with opening the final day. But Price has earned his place there, and he looks like he knows it.
There is something satisfying about seeing that journey completed. Twenty-four hours earlier, people have been huddled around him trying to avoid the rain; now he is standing on the biggest stage at the festival. The Long Road Festival talks a lot about supporting emerging talent, but moments like this are where you actually see what that can mean.
Errol Linton offers something entirely different, bringing his blues pedigree to the festival before attention turns back towards two artists who are impossible not to enjoy.
Ryan and Rory bring exactly the sort of energy Sunday needs. Both come into country music with previous careers in pop, and you can hear some of that instinct in their songwriting. These are two guys who know how to write a catchy tune, something their new song BEER WANTS ME proves almost immediately. Even the title feels designed to lodge itself in your head, and live it has exactly the sort of instant singalong quality that festival crowds thrive on.
What makes them particularly entertaining on stage, though, is how much they throw into delivering those songs. Switching between multiple instruments, bouncing off one another and seemingly incapable of standing still for very long, their infectious personalities quickly spread across the crowd. Add in the harmonies, obvious chemistry and, of course, the good looks, and they are something of a dream to watch on stage, particularly through a camera.
But underneath all that personality is genuine musicianship. Their pop backgrounds have clearly given them an understanding of how to construct something immediate and memorable, while country has given them a space where their personalities seem completely at home. BEER WANTS ME feels like a perfect example of that combination: fun, ridiculously catchy and not taking itself too seriously. They are one of my highlights of Sunday because there is simply something joyful about watching them. Ryan and Rory look like they are having the time of their lives, and before long everyone watching is having a pretty good time too.
Oliver Hazard shifts things towards indie-folk before another of my Sunday highlights arrives on the Rhinestone Stage.
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Maren Morris @ The Long Road Festival 2026 (Henry Finnegan / @finneganfoto)
Kezia Gill has become one of the most recognisable figures in British country, and her performance shows exactly why. There is a confidence to Gill now that comes from years of doing this, but crucially, it has not removed the warmth and personality that helped people connect with her in the first place.
Even what she is wearing tells you something about the artist she is. Gill walks onto one of the biggest stages at The Long Road Festival in an outfit she has made herself, every detail put together by her own hands. There is something rather poetic about that when you consider her career has been built in much the same way: piece by piece, detail by detail, doing the work herself and gradually creating something unmistakably hers.
And then comes perhaps the most perfect moment of the set. After two days in which the British weather has seemingly declared war on The Long Road Festival, Gill speaks about her late father and how she has prayed to him for some sunshine during her set. And, lo and behold, the sun comes out. Stanford Hall suddenly seems to light up around her, the sunshine arriving almost perfectly on cue. You can believe whatever you want about moments like that, but standing there watching it happen, it is difficult not to smile.
It gives an already emotional performance another layer. Gill commands a stage without making it feel like she is trying to command it. The big vocals are there, the songs are there, but so is the person behind them. On Sunday, dressed in something she has made herself and finally standing in the sunshine she has asked her dad for, it feels like we are seeing a little snapshot of her entire journey. She has built the outfit, she has built the career, and for a few minutes even the weather seems willing to play its part.
Around the rest of Stanford Hall, Lily Fitts brings a softer touch to proceedings, while Henry Grace and Dan Byrne offer still more reasons to keep wandering rather than planting yourself in front of the main stage for the entire day.
That remains one of the joys of The Long Road Festival: you can have a list of artists you absolutely need to see and still end up losing half an hour to somebody you have barely heard of simply because you happen to walk past at the right moment.
Jim Lauderdale is another artist who feels completely at home in the more intimate surroundings of the festival. A GRAMMY®-winning songwriter and one of those names whose fingerprints can be found across American roots and country music, Lauderdale does not need enormous production to make an impact. Give him songs, an audience willing to listen and a stage that allows both to breathe, and there is not much else required.
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Maren Morris @ The Long Road Festival 2026 (Henry Finnegan / @finneganfoto)
Emily Scott Robinson provides another reminder that some of The Long Road Festival‘s best performances do not necessarily need to be the loudest. Her songwriting-led approach rewards anyone willing to stop moving between stages for a while and simply listen, while Anne Wilson brings a more contemporary country sound as the afternoon moves towards evening.
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Maren Morris @ The Long Road Festival 2026 (Henry Finnegan / @finneganfoto)
Then there is Hayley Jensen. I have already caught Jensen on Saturday, but her Sunday appearance on the Front Porch is something else entirely. Calling it a Front Porch performance almost undersells what happens because the crowd seems determined to turn the whole area into one enormous dance floor. Jensen absolutely tears into the set and people pack around the stage, dancing wherever they can find enough room to move.
This is exactly why I love that stage. On paper, it is one of The Long Road Festival‘s more intimate spaces, but when the right artist catches fire, it can suddenly feel enormous. Jensen has already demonstrated the power of her voice the previous day, but here she seems to feed off the crowd and the crowd feeds straight back. By the end, the Front Porch feels less like somewhere you have wandered across at a festival and more like a party you have accidentally discovered and do not want to leave.
The Felice Brothers and The Brothers Comatose continue to demonstrate the depth of Americana, folk and roots running through the weekend, while Emmylou Harris brings something altogether different: genuine country music history.
Seeing Harris on the Rhinestone Stage is always going to be one of the most significant moments of the weekend. Her influence stretches far beyond country into folk and Americana, and simply having the opportunity to see an artist of her stature feels important. Musically, she is everything you would expect. That voice remains unmistakable and there are moments of genuine beauty throughout the set. Yet, if I am being critical, there is something slightly distant about the performance.
For all the history and significance surrounding her appearance, Harris does not always seem particularly thrilled to be there. Perhaps that is simply her understated stage presence, but from where I am standing there is a noticeable lack of connection with the occasion. It creates a strange contrast. I know I am watching a legend. I know how important those songs are and how rare the opportunity is. The performance itself is beautiful. Yet I cannot quite shake the feeling that Harris would rather be somewhere else.
That does not take anything away from what it means to see her. If anything, it makes the experience slightly more complicated. This is not a triumphant, arms-in-the-air festival performance; it is quieter, more restrained and perhaps one to appreciate for what you are witnessing rather than how loudly it demands your attention.
Outpost Drive and Jonny Morgan & The Moral Support help keep the music flowing elsewhere as the final hours of The Long Road Festival begin disappearing.
And then it is time for the final Rhinestone Stage headliner of 2026. Maren Morris arrives at Stanford Hall with a catalogue containing some enormous songs and a career that has increasingly refused to sit comfortably within a single genre.
Morris is an interesting artist for me because, personally, quite a lot of her music drifts beyond what I would normally consider country and into pop and R&B territory. The lines between genres have become increasingly blurred anyway, and Morris has spent much of her career happily walking across them, but there are certainly moments where this feels quite a long way from the traditional country and Americana heard elsewhere across the weekend. The crowd could not care less. They love her. And ultimately, that is what matters at a festival.
From the moment Morris arrives, the field in front of the Rhinestone Stage belongs to her. Whatever your personal opinion on exactly where her music sits within the country landscape, watching the reaction around Stanford Hall makes it impossible to question the connection she has with her audience.
For me, some of the material may sit closer to R&B and pop than the country music I naturally gravitate towards, but thousands of people singing and dancing around me clearly feel differently. That contrast is part of what makes The Long Road Festival interesting. The same festival that can give you Jim Lauderdale and Emmylou Harris can also end with Maren Morris, without feeling the need to tell you which version of country you are supposed to prefer.
And suddenly, that is it. Three days earlier, people have arrived at Stanford Hall beneath threatening skies. Since then, we have had thunderstorms stop performances, First Time Flyers turn an evacuation into a singalong, The Shires battle technical problems, Bec O’Malley step up, Josh Ross look every inch a future headliner, and Ronnie Wood and Imelda May somehow turn a replacement booking in the pouring rain into arguably the performance of the weekend.
Sunday has been different. For once, the weather has not become the enemy. Instead, we have watched Liam Price complete the journey from competition winner to the Rhinestone Stage, Ryan and Rory demonstrate that catchy songs, serious musicianship and infectious personalities are a pretty formidable combination, Kezia Gill stand in an outfit she has made herself as the sunshine she has asked her father for arrives almost on cue, and Hayley Jensen turn the Front Porch into one enormous dance floor.
We have watched a genuine legend in Emmylou Harris, even if the connection between artist and festival does not quite feel as strong as I had hoped, before Maren Morris shows exactly why country music’s boundaries continue to be debated — and why her audience does not seem particularly interested in debating them.
The Long Road Festival 2026
But the big names are not necessarily what stick with you most about The Long Road Festival. It is the smaller moments. It is being squeezed into shelter while a band starts singing. It is watching an emerging artist step onto a stage they have spent a year trying to reach. It is thousands of people refusing to leave while Ronnie Wood plays in torrential rain. It is a woman asking her late father for sunshine and watching the clouds seemingly listen. It is discovering someone you had not planned to see and immediately making a note of their name.
That is what The Long Road Festival does better than almost any festival I have attended. You arrive with a schedule full of artists you want to see and leave talking about half a dozen you did not know you needed to. By Sunday night, the boots are destroyed, the camera has survived more water than I would ever willingly expose it to again, and my legs are very aware that Stanford Hall is considerably bigger when you have spent three days repeatedly walking across it.
The Long Road Festival 2026
The Long Road Festival has given us pretty much everything: rain, lightning, sunshine, technical failures, surprise performances, new discoveries, genuine legends and one Rolling Stone standing in a field in Leicestershire while the heavens open. There is really only one thing left to face. The Long Road home.
Live review & photography of The Long Road Festival 2026 – Day Three @ Stanford Hall, Leicestershire, by Henry Finnegan on 30th August 2026. Instagram: @finneganfoto | Facebook: @finneganfoto
The Long Road Festival 2026 – Day Two: Who Needs Sunshine When You’ve Got Ronnie Wood?
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