Seventeen-year-old Emma Donald, a pupil at Dingwall Academy, has used the annual Inverness Music Festival as an ideal way to measure her success, progressing upwards in every event she has participated in since her festival debut 11 years ago.

Winning the Scott Skinner Trophy for her fiddle solo, the Sieczkarek Cup for her violin solo and being part of the Scottish idiom winning group, she will aim for more success next week.

"Emma puts pressure on herself," said her mum Janine. "But she has worked hard over the years to get to this point and this is her last year of competing."

The Dingwall Academy pupil, who accompanies on the piano Inverness Junior Singers Choir, also finished runner-up in the pianoforte solo contest.

Her piano tutor is Gordon Tocher of Inverness and her violin teacher is Rachel Farmer from Dores.

* The success of a young Ross-shire band at this year's Inverness Music Festival has meant that a teenage drummer and his fellow members have won the trophy awarded each year in memory of his own grandparents.

Kiltearn Fiddlers won the Sheila and Roddy Urquhart Trophy for the best Scottish Idiom Ensemble during last Saturday's competition at Eden Court.

Seventeen-year-old Greg Barry from Meikle Ussie, near Dingwall, is the new drummer of the group and the grandson of the late Sheila and Roddy.

Emma Donald with her two trophies from the Inverness Music Festival. Phil Downie 01463 831249

Sheila, a pianist and fiddler, originally from Shetland, and Roddy, a Tain-born accordionist who was brought up in Skye, formed the well-known Roddy Urquhart Dance Band which performed throughout the west coast in the 1960s.

They moved to Inverness where they formed the Glenbern Trio in the 1970s, and the couple later settled in North Kessock.

They were very well-known in Scottish traditional music circles and their daughter Kathleen recalls that Jimmy Shand used to visit their home.

Roddy died ten years ago and Sheila passed away a couple of years ago.

Sheila was very interested in encouraging youngsters to play traditional music and it was decided that half the money collected at her funeral would go to the hospice, and the other half to Friends of Highland Music. The money was spent on a quaich and this is the third year it has been awarded at the music festival.

Kathleen told the Journal that her son Greg, who plays in a funk blues band as well as Dingwall Academy's ceilidh band, just joined the Kiltearn Fiddlers, led by Alpha Munro, at the beginning of the year and only had three practices.

She said they only realised recently the Kiltearn Fiddlers would be competing for his grandparent's trophy and they kept it quiet until they were announced as the winners.

* See next week's Ross-shire Journal for results and local pictures.

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