Stonehaven Folk Festival
A 36th-year coastal festival that crowns the weekend with an Aqua Ceilidh in the open-air pool and a World Paper'n'Comb Championship alongside top trad acts.
A compact, well-served coastal town with a proper train link, multiple cafes and bakeries, a monthly farmers market, a nationally awarded chippy, a CAMRA-decorated real-ale pub, and Dunnottar Castle on the doorstep - there is more than enough here to justify a deliberate trip from almost anywhere in Scotland.
Cottages, B&Bs and hotels near Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire.
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"Heavy events, highland dancing and pipe bands on Aboyne Green in a long-running Deeside gathering."
Aboyne Highland Games
"Scotland's largest two-day agricultural show, established in 1864, draws around 24,000 visitors to The Haughs in Turriff for over 1,554 competition classes spanning livestock, working dogs and vintage vehicles."
Turriff Show
"Classic Deeside games of caber, hammer and dancing in a village beside Balmoral."
Ballater Highland Games
"The Royal Deeside market town of Banchory hosts its agricultural show each August at the gateway to the Cairngorms, where Aberdeenshire beef and Highland cattle are judged against a backdrop of the Forest of Birse and the River Dee shining in the valley below."
Banchory Show
"The March of the Lonach Highlanders, kilted men with pikes walking the glen, precedes a day of games at Strathdon."
Lonach Highland Gathering
"One of Scotland's most distinctive gatherings, the Lonach sees kilted clansmen march twelve miles carrying pikes before the Highland Games begin at Bellabeg in the upper Don valley."
Lonach Highland and Friendly Society Gathering
"Lauder's Common Riding is one of the most intimate of the Borders festivals, with a mounted Cornet leading riders along the ancient marches of this small market town on the edge of the Lammermuir Hills."
Lauder Common Riding
"Coldstream's civic week climaxes with the Coldstreamer leading a mounted rideout to Flodden Field, honouring the Borderers who fell in the 1513 battle in one of the most moving riding ceremonies in Scotland."
Coldstream Civic Week
"A man encased head to toe in sticky burrs walks the town for nine hours, a fertility custom of unknown but ancient origin."
Burryman's Parade
"One of Scotland's oldest music festivals brings Gaelic nights, ceilidhs, pipe bands and distillery tours to a remote Kintyre town at the road's very end."
Mull of Kintyre Music Festival
"Four days of traditional music on an Hebridean island reachable only by ferry, workshops, open sessions, ceilidhs in the island hall, and the Atlantic on all four sides."
Ceol Cholasa: Colonsay Folk Festival
Villagly Award · Hardest to Reach"Three days in a Black Isle village near Inverness where the sessions run late and the Moray Firth catches the September light outside, a small Highland folk festival doing exactly what it promised."
Ardersier Folk Festival