Beltane
30 April – 1 May
Beltane opened the summer half of the Irish year as Samhain closed it. The central rite recorded in early sources is the driving of cattle between two fires before moving them to summer pasture.
May customs across Britain, including hawthorn gathering, dew washing and maypoles, cluster around the same date without necessarily descending from the Irish festival.
The Beltane fires were revived at Edinburgh in the 1980s and now draw thousands, one of the clearer cases of a reconstructed festival becoming a genuine civic tradition.