Inside Iron Age Minds: From Ancient Picts to Modern Edinburgh Beltane
A narrative journey into Celtic life, kinship, and seasonal ritual north of Hadrian’s Wall
A narrative history grounded in archaeology. Explore the Edinburgh Beltane Fire Festival 2026—its history, rituals, and Celtic origins.
In this May issue of the Incredible Journey newsletter, I journey to the last Celtic frontier that stood against the Roman Empire. My fieldwork takes me north of Hadrian’s Wall into the ancient land of the Picti—the “painted ones”—where each Spring the night sky above Edinburgh’s Calton Hill erupts in the roaring fires of Beltane.
But before we meet the fire-lit faces of Beltane 2026, we step back two thousand years. Through historically grounded fictional characters, my story reimagines a Calton Hill Celtic settlement as it might once have lived and breathed—seen through the lives of one family, a master blacksmith, and a learned Druid. Here we encounter a matrilineal world bound by female inheritance, shaped by iron and bronze, and guided by leaders whose power lay in knowledge, ritual, and the enduring memory of place.
A Beltane Day in an Iron Age Settlement
Social Structure and Community Bonds
Agrarian life, kinship, and matrilocal household order
Standing on Carlton Hill, I see the sun lift slowly over the eastern waters of the Forth, and imagine its pale light touching timber roundhouses clustered on the slope above the marshy ground. Smoke already threads upward from low thatched roofs. In the largest house, run by Brigā Rigantīā of Brig-Dun, the hearth has never gone cold. It is her mother’s house in which she and the daughters remain while husbands come from other settlements, joining the kin of their wives. Brigā stands at the doorway, judging the morning air, feeling its dampness on her palms. She decides the day’s work: her daughter, Talorcia, is sent to the barley plots, her second daughter, Boudinā, to check the lambing pens, and her son-in-law, Drust, to mend wattle fencing trampled during the night.
Inside, the household stirs in practised rhythm. Grandaughter, Eponinā, grinds emmer wheat with a saddle quern, rocking stone over stone, while Brigā’s mother, Rigantā, plaits leather thongs for tethering calves. The talk is constant—short instructions, remembered obligations, news of kin from the neighbouring ridge. Kinship here binds labour and survival. Fields are not owned by individuals but held through lineage memory—passed through women. Rigantā remembers which strip of earth fed her mother and which meadow floods in winter. When disputes arise, it is elder women who recount inheritance lines, recalling births, marriages, and boundary stones long buried beneath grass.
Beyond the houses, men and women together guide cattle toward the temporary enclosures built for Beltane. The beasts shift restlessly, sensing the unusual preparations. Children carry bundles of dried brushwood, laughing and weaving between adults. There is excitement in the air, sharpened by responsibility. This day marks not only a celebration but a transition—the movement of herds toward summer grazing and the renewal of bonds between kin-groups who will gather before sunset. Every task performed now strengthens the ties that hold the settlement together: labour shared, food stored, lineage remembered.
Metalists and the Mastery of Iron and Bronze
Craft skill, ornament, and technological identity
By mid-morning, sparks leap from the workshop pit at the edge of the settlement. Here, the metalworkers labour—respected specialists whose knowledge passes through generations like guarded stories. The forge pit of Broccos Iron-Shaper glows, fed with charcoal carefully prepared over weeks. Bellows made from leather and wood wheeze rhythmically as a young apprentice presses them with steady feet. The iron within the crucible softens to a workable glow, its colour read like language by the master smith, who tilts his head and judges heat without touching flame.
Nearby, women sit with polished stones and small chisels, refining ornaments begun days before. A brooch takes shape—its pin slender but strong, its surface etched with tight spirals that echo patterns found in bone carvings and painted shields. These ornaments are more than decoration. They signal kin identity, alliances, and standing. A torc (thick, twisted metal worn at the throat) rests on a wooden form while its ends are smoothed into delicate terminals shaped like swelling buds. Each twist reflects hours of skill and the steady patience of hands trained from childhood.
Trade routes ripple outward from places like this settlement. Amber from distant coasts, tin from western lands, and copper from rugged hills pass through many hands before reaching the forge. The metalworkers understand these networks intimately, even if they have never seen the distant sources themselves. Their craft transforms raw earth into symbols of power and belonging.
On this Beltane morning, as smoke from the forge mingles with the scent of damp grass, the tools and ornaments prepared today will be worn during the evening gathering—bright metal catching firelight, marking both beauty and authority.
Druids and the Fires of Beltane
Learning, ritual authority, and nature-centred belief
As afternoon deepens, attention shifts toward the sacred enclosure just beyond the settlement’s outer fence. Here stand the Druids—both women and men—distinguished not by ornament alone but by bearing and voice. Their training has stretched across decades, memorising genealogies, healing lore, legal precedents, and the movements of stars and seasons. Druid Brigantā Fire-Keeper kneels beside a wooden bowl, crushing dried herbs into powder. Another traces lines in the soil, marking where the twin Beltane fires will stand once darkness falls.
Villagers gather as cattle are driven into a narrow passage formed between stacked woodpiles. Children cling to mothers’ cloaks, eyes wide with anticipation. Brigantā chants softly, voice low and rhythmic, invoking forces tied to land and sky—the fertility of earth, the safety of herds, the health of kin. When the fires are finally kindled, flames leap high, snapping and roaring as sparks whirl into the twilight. The heat presses against faces as smoke drifts across the gathered crowd. One by one, cattle are urged forward between the twin fires, hooves clattering, hides gleaming with reflected light. The smoke is believed to cleanse, to protect, to carry away illness that might threaten the summer herding.
Night settles fully, and the settlement glows with reflected flame. Music begins—horn and drum—echoing across the hillside. Dancers move in circles around the dying fires, bodies painted with ash and ochre, gestures echoing stories older than memory. Brigantā watches carefully, a guardian of knowledge and interpreter of signs: the direction of sparks, the behaviour of animals, the shift of wind. For Brigā and her household, this day has bound labour, craft, and belief into a single living thread. As embers fade toward darkness, the promise of summer lies ahead—secured through fire, memory, and the enduring strength of kin.
Ferocity when threatened
As the sun lowers beyond the western ridges, the calm rhythms of settlement life give way to a more watchful mood. News travels along kin networks faster than smoke on the wind—Roman soldiers have been seen again to the south, their roads cutting straight through forest and marsh, their forts planted like iron stakes into the land. The elders speak quietly, remembering past encounters. Roman writers such as Tacitus described northern tribes as fierce and unyielding, people who knew the land so intimately that bog, hill, and forest became weapons. In the settlement, farming tools stand beside weapons of defence: iron spearheads sharpened beside plough blades, hide shields hung near the doorway, ready should warning horns sound across the hills.
When conflict threatened, the same people who guided cattle and shaped ornaments transformed themselves into warriors of reputation and spectacle. Roman observers, including Cassius Dio, recorded their astonishment at northern fighters who stained their skin with pigments and entered battle with bodies exposed, their appearance as unsettling as their tactics. To Roman eyes, disciplined ranks and iron armour represented order; to the defenders of these northern lands, intimidation was a weapon in itself. Painted bodies glowed in firelight, hair stiffened with lime or bound tightly for combat. Warriors moved swiftly through familiar terrain, striking supply lines and vanishing into mist and woodland before heavily equipped legions could respond. These were not armies seeking conquest, but defenders resisting encroachment into ancestral ground.
Far to the south, Rome answered resistance with stone. The long barrier known today as Hadrian’s Wall stretched from sea to sea, its forts and watchtowers marking the edge of imperial ambition to control Pict movement and limit incursions. Yet beyond that frontier lay lands never fully subdued. Here, communities endured through mobility, memory, and fierce defence of territory. In this imagined settlement near the hills that would one day overlook Edinburgh, the children watching the warriors prepare would grow into adults who understood both worlds: the quiet labour of tending land, and the sudden necessity of protecting it. Their reputation for ferocity travelled southward with Roman reports, shaping the enduring image of northern peoples as both enigmatic and unconquered.
Edinburgh Beltane 2026
Two thousand years later, on Scotland’s most ancient night, painted bodies and fire still command attention—not on the battlefield, but on the slopes of Calton Hill, where performers step into flame-lit darkness to evoke the ancient power of spectacle. Wind still sweeps its slopes, and the turning of the seasons still calls people to gather at the edge of firelight. Two thousand years later, on the very ground where ancient communities once marked the changing year, thousands will again climb the hill—not to drive cattle between flames, but to witness a modern reimagining of Beltane, where sparks, shadows, and human storytelling keep the memory of seasonal fire alive.
Fieldwork
On the evening of April 30th, I stood among the gathering crowd on Calton Hill, camera-ready, waiting for the first sparks to rise into the dusk and anticipating the enthralling spectacle unfolding across three Acts of storytelling.
Act I — The Acropolis: Awakening from Winter
As twilight deepens over Calton Hill, the hilltop becomes a place of gathering forces. The Blue Men move first, steady and deliberate, their presence establishing order upon the rising ground. They are guardians of boundary and tradition, circling the performance space as if drawing an unseen line between the ordinary world and the ritual one. Behind them gather the figures of the May Queen’s white-clad court, their pale forms catching the last of the fading light. In their stillness lies the promise of awakening—white not as emptiness, but as the first brightness of dawn breaking across winter-dark fields.
Before the torches flare and the hill fills with fire, there is a smaller, quieter act—almost unnoticed by the crowd. At the Acropolis, hands work patiently against wood, drawing heat from friction alone. No flame is carried in; nothing is borrowed. Instead, fire is made anew. A faint thread of smoke appears, then a fragile ember, coaxed carefully into life. The kindling catches slowly, and from that first breath of life is spun to energise the flame and light the first torch. One source. From this single point, all other fires on the hill will take their light.
In that single act—the making of one fire from nothing—the logic of the entire night is revealed: that all transformation begins at a single point, carefully made and carefully shared. Then the stirring begins: the drums pound rhythmically, and a loud cheer spontaneously erupts from the thousands-strong crowd as the spectacle unfolds.
The May Queen rises from her winter slumber, supported by her attendants, while the Winter Green Man (The Withered Horned One) is burdened by the long season of cold in a flaming headdress. His movements feel heavy as he alights the Acropolis steps towards the May Queen, as though winter still clings to his limbs. The watchers on the hillside sense the tension between dormancy and life. The Winter Green Man is rejected by the May Queen.
Two thousand years earlier, Iron Age communities living beyond the frontier later marked by Hadrian’s Wall construction would have known this moment well—the fragile shift between winter survival and spring renewal. Fields lay waiting, their dead stubble burned to ash so the plough could turn fertile soil. The Blue Men guardians of today’s May Queen echo those ancient elders who once oversaw the careful use of fire, ensuring that renewal unfolded within order.
Act II — The Procession: The Hunt, The Flight, and The Return
Leaving the Acropolis stage, the procession begins with movement and rising tension. Torches flare as the performers descend into motion, circling the hill in a journey of theatrical stages that recall the ancient turning of seasons and the four elements. First is the fire arch stage. The Red Men burst into view with sudden energy, their bodies alive with heat and movement. They disrupt, challenge, and provoke, embodying chaos and untamed vitality. Their presence unsettles the ordered rhythm established by the Blue guardians, forcing the procession into moments of confrontation and escape. This is the Hunt—the raw pulse of spring’s unpredictability, when life pushes forward with dangerous force.
Among them, the Winter Green Man struggles between exhaustion and awakening, pursued and protected in equal measure. His journey through the torchlit procession mirrors the uncertain passage of the season itself. The archway is set ablaze. The May Queen passes through the cleansing fire and smoke, leading the procession around the hill towards the final stage (Act III).
In Iron Age farming communities, this was the time when cattle were driven between pillars of smoke, guided by steady hands and watchful eyes. Smoke cleansed and protected livestock before birthing and grazing began. The circling movement of performers—Blue restoring order, Red testing boundaries, White guiding the May Queen—recalls those ancient circuits through flame and haze. The Flight and Return feel less like theatre than memory, echoing the anxious vigilance of herders whose livelihoods depended on the survival of their animals through spring’s hazards.
Act III — The Pyre: Fire, Fertility, and Renewal
As the ritual nears its climax, the forces of colour gather with new purpose. The White-clad court surrounds the May Queen, their presence protective and unwavering, while the Blue Men hold the boundary between fire and crowd, maintaining order at the threshold of transformation. The Red Men, no longer disruptive, feed energy into the rising flames, their earlier chaos now harnessed into purposeful heat. At the centre stands the high-energy Summer Green Man, shedding the final burden of winter as he vigorously dances, juggling fire before the May Queen. The hill itself seems to breathe as sparks rise into the dark sky. The Summer Green Man is accepted and crowned by the May Queen in a fertility union to vigorous applause and cheering.
For Iron Age farmers, fire was not a spectacle but a matter of survival. After harvest, fields were burned to return ash to the soil, renewing fertility for the season ahead. Livestock were guided through smoke in the belief that flame purified and strengthened life before the birthing season began. The great pyre at the festival’s climax reflects these ancient practices, transforming destruction into promise. In this moment, the colours find balance: Blue holds order, Red fuels vitality, White protects new life, and Green embodies rebirth. As the flames fade and the crowd disperses, what remains is the enduring logic of renewal—an ancient understanding that from ash and smoke, life returns once more.
Epilogue
The fires on the hill do more than illuminate a night of performance—they reveal how deeply the past continues to shape the present. In the turning of seasons, in the careful tending of flame, in the instinct to gather as a community at moments of transition, we glimpse ways of thinking that long predate written history. Iron Age societies left no direct voice, yet their understanding of land, risk, renewal, and interdependence endures in quieter forms. The logic of their world—where fire cleansed, where kinship sustained survival, and where the balance between order and chaos had to be actively managed—remains embedded in human behaviour, even when its origins are no longer consciously remembered.
To engage with these traditions today is not to recreate the past, but to recognise its patterns and carry them forward with intention. Modern Beltane does not claim continuity, yet it channels something older: the recognition that renewal requires both release and responsibility, that communities are strengthened through shared ritual, and that our relationship with the natural world remains fundamental. In an age increasingly removed from seasonal rhythms, these reimaginings offer more than spectacle—they reconnect us to cycles that once governed survival itself. In that sense, the fire on Calton Hill is not simply symbolic; it is a reminder that ancestral wisdom, however transformed, still has the power to guide how we live, gather, and begin again.
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What next?
Inside Medieval Minds: Knights, Faith, and the Discipline of Service is the next step in this journey—a move into a world where belief was not abstract, but lived through rule, ritual, and action. This chapter will explore the extraordinary mindset of the medieval military orders, in which the knight was no longer an individual hero but part of a disciplined brotherhood bound by vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. From the legacy of the Knights Hospitaller to the enduring myths of the Knights Templar, the story will trace how faith and warfare fused into a single purpose: protecting others as an act of devotion.
But this will not be a story confined to the past. As with Avebury Equinox and Edinburgh Beltane, the search is for continuity—for the places, people, and moments where the ancestral mind still breathes. From ancient institutions that continue their charitable mission to modern volunteers who embody the same ethos of service, this next instalment will reveal how the warrior-monk has not disappeared but has evolved. Expect a journey through living traditions, powerful symbolism, and human stories that collapse the distance between centuries, where the values that once shaped crusader knights can still be found, quietly at work, in the present day.
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Martin Urch Photography owns the copyright to all writing and images
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Yet another interesting article Martin, with first rate images.