https://vo.rs/tags/edinburgh/Recent content in Edinburgh on vo.rsHugoenThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Sat, 30 Apr 2022 09:00:00 +0000https://vo.rs/encore/beltane-fire-edinburgh/Sat, 30 Apr 2022 09:00:00 +0000https://vo.rs/encore/beltane-fire-edinburgh/<p>On the last night of April, a hill in the middle of Edinburgh fills with drums and torchlight and several hundred people painted red from the scalp down, and they spend the dark hours dragging summer up out of the ground by force. That is Beltane, and the strangest thing about it is how new it is. The rite it performs is old enough to be genuinely Celtic. The festival you can actually attend was built by a handful of art-punks in 1988, and I think that combination is exactly why it works.</p>