Folk singer Bella Hardy, winner BBC Radio 2 Folk Award’s Folk Singer of The Year 2014, is to perform a concert in Cheshire.

Bella turns 30-years-old on May 24 and, to mark the occasion, she has embarked on a 30 date celebratory tour.

That tour arrives in Cheshire on  Wednesday, May 14 when she plays at the Weaver Hall Museum in London Road, Northwich.

She is on the road with her band The Midnight Watch, celebrating her six solo albums to date.

One of the most creative, prolific and original singers in the UK and now winner of the BBC Radio 2 Folk Singer of The Year award, Bella Hardy's captivating voice inhabits her characters and spins her stories with an equal balance of strength and sensitivity.

With fiddle in hand, she presents folk songs in the best tradition - as relevant and very human artworks.

Four time nominee at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, and winner of Best Original Song in 2012 for The Herring Girl, her own songs range in subject matter from fairy tales to working class history, via childhood nostalgia, myth, murder and the human condition.

Her latest album Battleplan (2013) won universal critical acclaim.

Growing up in Edale in the Peak District, with a family who sang in the local choir, book loving Bella was drawn to the tales contained in old ballads.

But her path to a career in traditional music began with visits to folk festivals, joining a school ceilidh band, and attending the Folkworks summer school in Durham where, aged 13, she joined the teenage ensemble The Pack with whom she performed for 10 years.

In 2004 she entered the BBC Young Folk Award and reached the finals - for which she taught herself to fiddle-sing.

In 2007 Bella added to her BA in English literature with a Masters degree in music from Newcastle University, emerging from her studies with the traditional and original songs that formed her impressive debut album Night Visiting. 

Accompanied by former Last Night’s Fun box player Chris Sherburn, Bella trod the folk club and festivals circuit, all the while embarking on projects as diverse as they were daunting in scale and ambition.

This included singing the Scottish ballad Annie Laurie on Radio 2’s Titanic: Minute by Minute programme (the song was said to have been heard on the SS Californian as it sailed by the doomed ship) or performing unaccompanied in the centre of a sold-out Royal Albert Hall during The Proms.

More recently she co-wrote with former Beautiful South guitarist David Rotheray for his concept album The Life of Birds and composed the music for Radio 4’s The People’s Post – a documentary on the history of the Post Office.

Bella’s second album In The Shadow of Mountains saw her writing songs of modern social history (in particular the 2007 foot-and-mouth outbreak that devastated farming communities) and retellings of familiar folk tales in urban domestic settings.

2011 saw the release of award-winning Songs Lost and Stolen LP, beginning with an album inspired by and adapted from The Ballads and Songs of Derbyshire, published in 1867.

The Dark Peak and The White, produced by Lau’s Kris Drever, confirmed her place as one of modern folk’s finest singers.

In that same year Bella recorded and released another album Bright Morning Star. Intended simply as a souvenir of her seasonal tour, the record - which combined yuletide standards with traditional carols – received a four star review from The Times.

2012 also saw the fruition of a long-held plan to record an album with Brit folk trailblazer Eliza Carthy and friends Lucy Farrell and Kate Young.

Initially just an idea in Northumbrian piping pioneer Kathryn Tickell’s head, Carthy, Hardy, Farrell and Young released their debut album Laylam at the start of 2013.

Spring 2013 saw the release of Battleplan, Bella Hardy’s latest studio album on which new perspectives are given to some of her favourite traditional songs, and her own life intertwines with those of the heroines of folk songs past.

Battleplan is Bella’s most musically expansive and lyrically personal album to date; produced by Mattie Foulds and recorded with her touring band The Midnight Watch.

Tickets for her Northwich concert are £7, £6 members. Call 01565 733197 or visit www.northwichfolk.co.uk.