For the last 12 years it has been a highlight of the festival calendar but now Porthleven's Spring Masked Ball is at an end.

Organisers have announced that this year's event will not be taking place, after the decision to leave the cliff-top site at Beacon Crag.

However, the team behind the colourful creations have promised something new, more charity based, to fill the void, with full details being revealed later this week.

Ball founder Kelvin Batt, who has been staging the event since 2007, said it was with a "heavy heart" that the team were leaving their Spring Ball home and stressed that it was in no way related to an incident on the same night as last year's event, in which three men were airlifted to Derriford Hospital after falling 30 feet down a cliff near to the festival site.

Making a statement on Facebook, he said: "It's with a heavy heart (but also with a massive slice of gratitude for being able to do it in the first place) that we have to say goodbye to the amazing space that is our spring ball home.

"At one point the ball was one of the longest-standing festivals in the country giving good donations to charities and I feel truly blessed to say we hosted acts such as Bonobo, Groove Armada, TEED, Andrew Weatherall, Basement Jaxx, B traits, Norman Jay as well as hundreds of local heroes and some amazing collectives.

"We've had ball pools, water slides, rockets,walk-in wardrobe raves and even a UFO that was built by some talented friends. Not bad, I think, for a couple of skint scallywags.

"All the platforms that we've partied on we landscaped ourselves, put the infrastructure in and even gravelled a drive or two - a 12-year project by a bunch of mad Cornish lunatics.

"[I'm] feeling super lucky to have been involved with something with so many talented good folk and to have created memories that will stay with us all for a long time."

He went on to tell the Packet that it simply cost too much to put on the festival in relation to the ticket price.

He added that it was becoming increasingly difficult to police people trying to sneak in - something that didn't happen up to a few years ago.

"We found more and more people getting in for free, which is a shame when you look at how much we have given to various charities in and around the village," said Kelvin.

Each year the festival gives away thousands of pounds to charities and good causes.

Kelvin also teased a future project that the team are planning, saying: "We are going to do something fresh to fill the void - a ball but with no masks and charity led, at 1,000 capacity."

He said it would be an "intimate affair", with a focus on charity, more along the likes of the original balls he organised, with the beneficiaries being Trelya, which provides positive interventions into the lives of the hardest to reach children and young people in West Cornwall, and the Wave Project, an award-winning surf therapy and beach school project provided around the UK.