Shetland Wool Week
A world-renowned week celebrating Britain's most northerly native sheep and the Shetland textile tradition, with knitting demonstrations, croft visits, a new hat pattern each year and events spread across the islands for 2026's Together Through Makkin theme.
Lerwick is Shetland's only town and a genuine destination in its own right, with a harbour-front cafe culture, a working brewery, Norse heritage, and the Up Helly Aa fire festival giving it a vitality rare for a community this far north and this remote.
Cottages, B&Bs and hotels near Lerwick, Shetland.
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"Said to be the most prestigious traditional accordion and fiddle event in Scotland, it builds to a world famous Grand Dance with six hours of live music from eleven dance bands."
Shetland Accordion and Fiddle Festival
"Shetland's oldest fire festival opens the islands' Viking season each January with 200 to 300 torch-bearing guizers escorting a burning longship galley through the streets of Shetland's former capital to the harbour at Port Arthur."
Scalloway Fire Festival
"Up to a thousand torch-bearing guizers in Viking dress march through the dark and set a full-size longship galley ablaze."
Up Helly Aa
✦ Weird and Wonderful"Founded in 1961 by a group of friends reluctant to end their New Year celebrations, this community fire festival lights up Shetland's east Mainland each February with a torchlit galley procession and squads of guizers in hand-crafted Viking costumes."
Nesting and Girlsta Up Helly Aa
"Shetland's second-oldest fire festival, held since 1911 on Britain's most northerly island, draws over 200 guizers through the dark February night before a Viking galley is set ablaze on the shore at Uyeasound."
Uyeasound Up Helly Aa
"A day of riding the marches, fair-crying and emblems of thistle and heather in this Dumfriesshire town."
Langholm Common Riding
"Children in elaborate horse costumes parade, then boys plough miniature furrows in the sand at the Hope."
Boys' Ploughing Match and Festival of the Horse
"Birthplace of the Scottish Snowdrop Festival, Cambo Estate holds the Plant Heritage national collection of over 200 specialist snowdrop varieties carpeting 70 acres of woodland walks down to the Fife coast."
Cambo Estate Snowdrop Festival
"Cornet and mounted supporters ride the marches to drum and fife, commemorating a 1514 skirmish."
Hawick Common Riding
"Hundreds of riders follow the standard bearer round the burgh boundaries in the oldest of the Borders common ridings."
Selkirk Common Riding
"A week of riding the marches, crowning of the Beltane Queen and pageantry in this Tweed valley town."
Peebles Beltane Festival