You may have heard of it, it’s kind of a big deal… At the end of the year tens of thousands of people make their way North to celebrate the New Year Scottish style… commonly known as HOGMANAY!

After one of those brutal nights spent on an overnight bus I arrived back in what has always been one of my favourite cities. Something about Edinburgh’s looming dark high rises make me feel right at home amongst all the witches and murderers, (I did do the ghost tour but I’m still a skeptic…

It was a bit early, I couldn’t remember the last time I had been up and moving at 6.30. But something about exploring the streets of a city before it wakes up made it worth the rainy journey to my hostel, which happened to be directly across from the Castle, and yes we could see it from our bedroom window!!

The common room was filled with us poor overnight bus journey victims and every couch, beanbag and armchair was filled with a sleeping traveller, each trying to get as much sleep as possible before the festival began than night!

The night before New Years Eve involves the ‘Torchlight Ceremony’, the procession of thousands of people, Viking or not, carrying a torch top the top of Carlton Hill all raising money for charity, this year being Radio Forth Cash for Kids and Barnardo’s Scotland. The march is long and crowded and I had to continuously remind myself that along with the amazing amount of people marching alongside me I was carrying a stick of fire… a stick of fire that was slowly shrinking in length…

There was an amazing vibe within the crowd and even though it was your typical chilly Scottish winter night (not raining though luckily) the torches made the procession comfortably warm… Different music would be heard at different points featuring of course bagpipes and traditional Scottish tunes as well as more modern tunes cleverly making reference to ‘fire’, we realised that they obviously couldn’t find too many relevant hits after about the fifth round of Ellie Goldings’ ‘Burn’…

Of course Pet Shop Boys were headlining the Street party the following night so we had our fair share of turns listening to ‘Go West’.

As we ventured further out of the centre of the city the streets became darker, only illuminated by the torches and the music could no longer be heard… There were moments when I almost felt completely alone amongst the crowd, just my torch and I, on a mission to join the congregation on the top of the hill.

As we rounded the final corner of the walk the illusion of solitude was destroyed as I realised the size of the crowd… people were everywhere, music was blasting and the viking ship was burning? (Another unique tradition of the festival). Forgetting that most of the crowd members were holding sticks of fire, that were now dangerously short, I could not work out why a man started hitting me… Just as I was about to get angry for the spontaneous assault I realised it was just a friendly samaritan extinguishing a fellow marcher… I thanked my saviour and carried on making my way through the crowd.

We found a spot on top of the hill within the crowd where we all waited for the first fireworks display of the festival, after another 3 rounds of the ‘funky-fire-songs’ playlist our patience was rewarded with a spectacular sky show, unlike any fireworks display I had ever witnessed! The sky sounded like a war zone and the colourful explosions were so constant that even blinking left you missing part of the show! This all coming from the girl that got bored during firework displays as a child… It was impressive to say the least.

It was a very cold night so I could not work out why my arm was becoming so warm… oh that’s right.. stick of fire… burning my arm…

I wasn’t even slightly bothered by the fact that I had been so distracted by the sky show that I had literally just leant the flame on the only exposed part of my arm. Extinguishing my torch I continued to enjoy the rest of the show in absolute awe.

Knowing that this was only the beginning of what was to be 3 days of extreme celebration I could only speculate on how exciting the rest of the festival would be. It sure was a hard act to follow…

So far Hogmanay had risen above all expectations and I was desperate for the rest of the festival to Ignite.

• Europe
• Festival
• Hogmanay
• New Years
• Scotland
• Torch Light Procession
• Travel
• United Kingdom
• Winter