Held every year on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, the modern festival is a procession lead by the May Queen and her counterpart, the Green Man. The wild mix of drums, fire and physical theatre seen during Edinburgh’s Beltane Fire Festival is a spectacular sight to be seen and carries on into the early hours of the first day of May. Beltane – which roughly translates as “bright fire” – was a tradition celebrated in various forms across the British Isles as the starting point of summer. One of four seasonal festivals (along with Samhuinn, Imbolc and Lughnasadh), it was a chance for communities to come together to mark the changing of the seasons.
Lighting the Beltane fires on the first of May was a symbolic move to recall the growing power of the sun and cleanse the community of the dark months spent indoors. In Scotland, cattle were traditionally driven around these fires and the community would dance and leap over the flames. By the late nineteenth century, this practice had been almost abandoned. The fires of public Beltane celebrations in Edinburgh remained unlit until the modern festival was started in 1988 by a small group of enthusiasts, led by Angust Farguhar, then of the industrial music group, Test Dept, and with academic support from the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
