Download Festival is held each year in Castle Donington in England since 2003, featuring some of the world’s great bands.

These are some of the bands which played this year:

• Slipknot
• Trivium
• Tool
• Smashing Pumpkins
• Slayer
• Enter Shikari
• Alien Weaponry
• Underoath
• Def Leppard
• Slash
• Whitesnake
• Rob Zombie
• Eagles of Death Metal

Besides the great bands that played, it was an absolute mud-pit/ mud-bath/ mud-fest with the torrential rain from the Thursday to relatively incessant showers of rain throughout the Friday to Sunday.

There were a number of campers who’s tents got inundated with rain and had left the festival early or seek accommodation elsewhere.

Besides all the rain, there were a couple things I found along the way to make the trip a bit more bearable:

• Wellies (the mud actually reached the top of the Wellingtons)
• Lots of thick socks for wearing inside the wellies
• Plasters (for when your wellies take revenge on your feet, but the socks kind of prevent blisters)
• Lightweight packable jacket in addition to whatever warm layer of clothing you have on the day (it had a tendency to be pretty chilly at night mid-summer)
• Packable rain jacket with 5000mm rainproofing
• SPF50 sunblock (yes… being outside all day you can burn even in the cloud cover)
• Tissues (helpful especially if you’re a chick when the loos have no TP)
• Earplugs (great for if you have a speaker right next to you)
• Anti-bacterial wipes or hand sanitiser (the loos generally have, but they do run out eventually)
• Lip balm

For extra points for a festival inundated with rain and mud:

• Bring a camping chair (it’s such a pleasure to sit on something that is not mud when your feet are aching)
• Have an A4 size waterproof bag (if you don’t have one, putting your bag under your rain jacket during a downpour works)
• A cap to keep the rain off your face (because there is nothing more irritating than rain on the face!)
• Decent size umbrella (especially for when you’re sitting it helps keep your chair, legs and bag dry during a downpour)
• Or just waterproof pants! I saw a couple people wearing them in addition to a rain jacket and they did look quite stoked about being dry.

Unfortunately, it does give you the look of a fisherman rather than a metalhead, but these things do help when you’re at a British summer festival and you have the misfortune of a rainy festival.

This can also apply to an Irish festival. I went to the Metallica concert at Slane Castle in Ireland just one week before Download Festival and this advice would have been great and applied to that too.