PEEBLES Beltane Festival will have the finest turned out court and parade of characters after bagging £4,000 from Tesco’s Bags of Help community grant scheme.

As part of the historic festival, a team of dedicated ladies work tirelessly behind the scenes designing, mending and adjusting hundreds of costumes, making is one of the Borders most colourful parades.

And this year, the hardworking Beltane Committee has it truly sewn up after scooping the token jackpot at the supermarket.

The scheme sees grants raised from the sale of carrier bags awarded to thousands of local community projects every year.

The much-loved festival is without a doubt expensive to run each year, and the Beltane Committee is very thankful to the community for voting.

Beltane Festival Chairman Keith Brunton added: “The Beltane is delighted to have been awarded £4000 from Tesco Bags of Help.

"We are grateful to all those shoppers who choose to give the Beltane their tokens. The other two organisations we were matched against were both highly deserving and do excellent work locally. Due to the way that Tesco have set up the scheme we all received money so in a way we are all winners.

“The money we receive is going directly towards the children’s costumes. Our team of costumes ladies work year-round to prepare, repair and replace hundreds of costumes each year. They have often been helped in the past by local businesses such as Holland and Sherry and the Castle Warehouse who have been generous with donations of fabric as well the many other things needed to get the costumes ready for our Red Letter Day”.

“Now our Queen and Court have been chosen for this year the ladies are already hard at work making sure everyone will look their best, adjusting costumes to fit perfectly. They are also hard at work preparing a long list of what they need to buy to ensure that the money from Tesco is spent in the best way possible to take the Beltane Costumes into the future.”