A POPULAR annual music festival held near Oswestry will not take place in 2020 because of the coronavirus outbreak.

The Whittington Music Festival, which attracts musicians from across the world, was set to take place in May.

Organisers have confirmed there are no plans to re-schedule the 2020 event, and are looking ahead to next year’s festival already.

Lawrence Mortimer, festival secretary, felt it would have been too much of a risk to allow the event to go ahead this year.

He said: “It won’t be held this year, and we’re already starting to make plans for the festival in May of next year, which we’re hoping will be ok to go ahead.

“So we’re definitely hoping to hold the event again next year, but we have completely written this year’s event off.

“We had quite a lot of musicians coming from Switzerland and Hungary this year, and we did have a musician from China coming too.

“We thought it wouldn’t be a very good idea to risk it going ahead before the government’s advice, so we took the decision to say it wasn’t going ahead.

“Fingers crossed we’ll be back to normal next year.”