Strathallan Country Park – home to the final two T in the Park festivals – is to again host a major music event in 2020.

Mugstock – which began its life at Mugdock Country Park near Milngavie four summers ago – is to make its home in the grounds of the traditional seat of the Viscount Strathallan, situated near Perth.

Beginning in 2015, just as T in the Park moved from its base at Balado, Mugstock has grown in size over the past four years, but is still aiming at a capacity of just 1,500 – somewhat less than the 70,000 that DF Concerts’ event attracted in its 2016 incarnation.

This should mean that while the Strathallan site was unpopular with some revellers, most of the criticism levelled concerned the hold-ups in getting on and off the site due to the numbers of attendees.

However, despite its modest size, Mugstock has already attracted many top names to its bill, including the likes of Roddy Woomble, Emma Pollock, Malcolm Middleton Stanley Odd, Bombskare and Rachel Sermanni.

For their considerably more intimate festival, the organisers feel that the new site will be an excellent fit, as they have explained in detail.

“We’ve known for a while that Mugdock probably wouldn’t be our forever home,” say the festival’s founders, Alan Govan and Stuart Nelson.

They pay tribute to the team at the festival’s former home: “The park team were so accommodating and supportive of MugStock, letting us explore different ways of making the most creative use of the available land, but this never quite addressed the fact that there was always just a little less of it available than would have been ideal.

“We want the festival to grow over the next few years. Not by a huge margin – we emphatically are not setting out to produce the next T in the Park – but if we can welcome a few more nice people we can increase our programming budget and book some more established acts which are just outwith our grasp with our current stature.”

The pair point out the difficulties which were presented in organising an event in a public park which is also one of the country’s top natural attractions

“At Strathallan we will have a site all to ourselves and the ability to create the type of fully immersive festival environment we know our community will love to share with us,” they say.

The organisers added that a debt was owed to the site’s previous occupants – like so may music fans, the Mugstockfounders both attended their first festival, T in the Park, in the late 1990s, and “bored our friends with excited ramblings about all the things we’d do differently, and all the little touches we could add to the festival experience, given the chance to do it ourselves.”

“So MugStock probably wouldn’t be what it is without T in the Park. Kudos and thanks to DF Concerts.”

Mugstock 2020 will take place at Strathallan Castle from 31 July to 3 August.