Lauren MacColl considers the implications of the "classic album" status that the Celtic Connections festival has attached to her debut CD, When Leaves Fall, and decides that, as a marketing tool, it's OK. As a statement of fact? Well, that's another matter.

"I don't think it means a classic that's stood the test of time," says the young fiddler from the Black Isle. "I think it's more a case of Maeve (singer Maeve MacKinnon), who shares a festival double bill with MacColl and me being chosen as a representation of what's been happening in traditional music this past year."

Outstanding though When Leaves Fall is - if The Herald had a folk album of the year and this writer were allowed to choose it, its blend of timeless tradition and effortless modernity would have secured it the prize - the 21-year-old won't be letting the "classic" tag go to her head. Having won the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award in 2005, she's aware of the lift such titles can give to a career, but is level-headed enough not to place too much importance on them.

"It's definitely easier to promote yourself when you have something like the Young Folk Award attached to your name, and that acted as a real spur for me," she says. "It made me work really hard at expanding my repertoire because I couldn't have listened to more than ten minutes of myself at the time. And because you get gigs as part of the prize, suddenly you can phone people up and ask them to work with you, instead of saying, D'you fancy getting together for a tune?' But I was also very aware that, within a year, somebody else would have the title and be getting all the attention I'd been getting."

She also resisted the pressure to cash in on her Young Folk success by releasing an album straight away. She's glad she waited, allowing time for her playing to mature further - particularly with regard to the slow airs that are her passion and were part of the fiddle's initial attraction.

She began classical violin lessons when she was ten, but had been pestering her parents for a fiddle from the age of six, when her grandparents took her to see Phil Cunningham and Aly Bain in Inverness. "I can remember going to their concerts every year and just loving it," she says. "I was mesmerised.

"I didn't know the difference between classical violin and fiddle when I started, but about a year after I began lessons I went to the Feis Rois teaching festival and that really opened my eyes. I discovered it was OK to learn tunes by ear, and that put me on a different path."

She continued playing classical music with a schools orchestra but learned new skills on trips to Skye and Stirling University, where Shetland fiddler Catriona Macdonald taught a course. As she marked the calendar waiting for Feis Rois to come round again ("That's how sad I was"), her weekends were spent alternately searching for fiddle lessons and participating in Highland dancing competitions. Something had to give. First it was the orchestra. Then it was a knee, which meant she had to retire from competitive dancing.

"At Feis Rois the tutors would be people like Iain MacFarlane and Allan Henderson, who were experienced players by then but still not all that far ahead of me in terms of age, and I found that inspiring," she says. "I suppose if I'd applied myself, I might have done Celtic Studies or something else academic, but all I really wanted to do was play the fiddle."

The Scottish Music course at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow beckoned, and she cites her final year's studies with the great Perthshire fiddler Pete Clark as invaluable experience. They would work together on her phrasing in painstaking detail, spending an hour's lesson on one bar.

"That's what I needed to do," she says. "I really wanted to work on my tone and expression. Although I love groups like Lau, who are really exciting and different every time, that's not necessarily what I feel at home with on the instrument. When I put a bow on a string, I want to communicate rather than entertain."

Singers are a big influence, particularly Kathleen MacInnes, Calum Alex MacMillan and James Graham, and she finds she identifies more with their interpretation and the instrument-like tone of their voices than she does with other fiddlers. She's also keen to delve deeper into the music of her native Ross-shire. An album drawn from the Highland Collection book of tunes, with paintings or photographs of the places that inspired the music, would, she says, be the ideal follow-up to When Leaves Fall.

"I think it's important to feel a connection with where you come from through music," she says. "There were two fiddlers in my family before me, my great-grandfather and my great-uncle, and there are tapes somewhere of my great-uncle playing. So I'm always asking people to clear out their lofts."

Not so much Cash in the Attic as Cassettes in the Attic, perhaps, but a potential treasure-hunt all the same.

  • Lauren MacColl plays at St Andrew's in the Square, Glasgow, on January 18. When Leaves Fall is on Make Believe Records.