Scotland has the best winter fire festivals in the UK. Combine the primitive urge to light up long nights, the age-old idea that fire purifies and drives away evil spirits, and the natural Scottish urge to party until the wee hours of the morning and you’ll end up with some of the most dazzling and daring winter celebrations. of Europe. .
At one point, most Scottish cities celebrated the New Year with large bonfires and torchlight processions. Many have disappeared, but those that remain are true fangs. Here are the top five winter fire festivals in Scotland.
The Stonehaven Fireball Festival
At least 45 strong Scots dare demons, most in Kilts, parading through town on New Years Eve swinging 16-pound fireballs around and overhead. Each swinger has his own secret recipe for creating the fireball and keeping it alight. Thousands come to see this famous event on the North Sea, south of Aberdeen. It all starts before midnight with bands of pipers and wild drums. Then a lone piper, who plays Scotland the Brave, leads the pipers into town. At midnight, they raise their fireballs above their heads and begin to sway and spin, bathing the street, themselves, and usually the strong crowd of 12,000, with sparks. As you can imagine, the wild party continues until the early hours.
Burning the clavie
This bizarre ritual, on a dirt spit on the edge of the Moray Firth, involves a burning tar barrel, a clavie, filled with wood shavings, tar, and barrel staves. Nailed to a post (some say with the same nail, year after year) he marches around the town of Burghead, Scotland, before being lit by one of the town’s oldest residents with smoking peat from his own fire. As he makes his circuit, smoldering embers are sometimes presented to homes to light their own fires. It then becomes the base of an even larger beacon fire on a hill in an ancient Pictish stone altar. When it finally breaks down, spreading embers across the hill, the locals scramble to catch some to start their first New Year’s hearth fire. The origins can be pictorial, Celtic or Roman; nobody really knows. In the past, clerics tried to ban it as a pagan abomination, but it persists, as exciting and terrifying as ever.
By the way, if you can’t get there in the dead of winter, head to the Moray Firth in warmer climates. It is known as one of the best places to see dolphins at play in all of Europe.
Hasta Helly Aa
A thousand “Viking” clad torches spend all day cruising a Viking galley through Lerwick, Shetland’s main port. There are a lot of loud, Vikings singing and then in the sea the torch bearers throw their torches at the ship and set it on fire. The Viking festival lasts approximately 24 hours. If you can’t make it to Shetland on the last Tuesday in January, you might meet the Up Helly Aa Vikings a little earlier in Edinburgh, where they usually lead that city’s torchlight parade through Edinburgh Hogmanay.
While Up Helly Aa has all the makings of an ancient Viking orgy, it is actually a relatively modern innovation, dating back to the 1880s. It was then that local youth and the city council joined forces to have some control over the wild Christmas and New Years spree, firing guns and the general chaos that persisted after the soldiers returned from the Napoleonic Wars with a taste for big bangs. That doesn’t suggest that Up Helly Aa is tame now, far from it. Lots of beer and scotch take care of that. But it is a very well planned event (scheduled for BBC cameras), with planning, costume making, and the construction of a Viking ship beginning almost a year earlier.
Biggar’s bonfire
The great New Year’s Eve bonfire in the center of this South Lanarkshire town has been going on for hundreds of years. There is a parade of torches, pipers and drums and an annual ritual with the oldest resident of the city lighting the fire. What makes this event special (and especially terrifying) is that, while bonfires are lit elsewhere in open fields or on top of empty hills, this large bonfire is lit in the middle of the main street of the city, surrounded of houses and shops. Despite that, it is a family affair with the participation of all ages.
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The procession of Comrie Flambeaux
Like something out of a horror movie, the people of this Perthshire town set fully grown birch trees, wrapped in burlap soaked for weeks in paraffin and tar, on fire. The eight great torches march around the city before throwing them, with their load of evil spirits for a year, into a river. Flames leap up to ten feet above tree torches.
