Helen Moore, Beltane Fire Society organiser, shows there’s more to this loss than Edinburgh may realise.

Last week the Beltane Fire Society (BFS) announced the cancellation of 2003s Beltane Fire Festival on Edinburgh's Calton Hill. This was blamed on the festival's spiralling costs and a lack of support from the Council's Culture and Leisure Department. Thus ironically on the eve of Council elections, April 30th will go unmarked by the characteristic procession and bonfire to celebrate the ancient Celtic festival. Initial reactions to this news have focussed on the loss to Edinburgh. But as Helen Moore, a Beltane organiser, shows, it runs deeper than many realise.

That Edinburgh has lost a festival with tourist-appeal is evident in Edinburgh and Lothians Tourist Board's comment (quoted on March 8th in the Evening News’ exclusive): "It's sad and disappointing that it's been cancelled this year and we hope it will be resurrected in the future. The event is one of the few in Edinburgh's eclectic calendar which celebrates our Celtic roots and heritage. It provides fantastic pictures which are beamed around the world."

And indeed the festival is visually stunning, attracting photographers like bees to honey. The torch-lit procession, accompanied by powerful drumming, opened with fire sculptures suspended between the Acropolis's pillars. Then, led by a flower-bedecked May Queen, with woaded warriors to smooth its path, the procession would wind its way around the hill, passing through elemental points where performers made offerings to the Earth's renewed fertility. At the Fire Point, performers had spectators swarming.

From humble origins, the Festival grew rapidly. Started 15 years ago by visionary artists, it’s since become the largest fire festival in Europe. Comparable with Shetland's "Uphellyar" and Valencia's "Fallas" festival in scale and community participation, Beltane is an internationally acclaimed event, receiving coverage by media including the BBC and Channel Four. Also featured in numerous magazine and web articles, including "National Geographic", Germany's "Marie Claire", British Airways, as well as international tourist guides, including France's "Guide Michelin", it's described as a major and exciting event worth visiting Edinburgh for.

Fusing the Roman "Flower Festival", which bequeathed Britain the medieval traditions of May Queens and May Poles, with the Celtic tradition of celebrating Spring, the contemporary festival rekindled part of Scotland's cultural heritage. Historically Beltane rites had dwindled since the Reformation's attempts to obliterate so-called "superstitious practices" of Catholicism. By the late twentieth-century all but a shred of the formerly widespread festivities remained in remote corners of folk memory.

Traditionally Scotland's beacon hills would have been ablaze at Beltane. Since fire was sacred to the Celts, as the School for Scottish and Celtic Studies' Dr. Emily Lyle explained at a BFS conference, ritual "Neid Fires" were created at in each village. This involved the extinguishing of all hearth-fires and the making of new fire by rubbing two special sticks together. From this sacred fire, "clavies" (embers) then re-lit the community's hearth-fires.

In keeping with this tradition, at Beltane 2002 a single flame produced in this way lit processional torches and the bonfire ending the ritual performance. Although this bonfire had safety barriers placed around it, in an urban environment it's still had importance, reminding revellers remaining on Beltane night to watch the city's eastern horizon for the restoration of Beltane's "Big Sun".

Fortunately, for coming generations, images of this Celtic revival will remain in the impressive archive of the Beltane festivals. However, today Edinburgh people are denied the chance to be moved by a unique event celebrating their cultural heritage. For regular participants, the festival's disappearance from the city has struck hard. Pete Renwick, a fire performer, said: "The loss will be felt most by the 2-300 performers who gather and rehearse for up to two months putting in their own time and money to produce one of the most spectacular events of the year."

Having always striven to be as inclusive as possible, Beltane has over time nurtured the creativity of thousands of participants like Mr. Renwick, through performance and craft workshops. BFS members come from a wide range of backgrounds from bank workers to students to lone parents. Time and again they have explained how participation has developed their confidence, personal creativity, team-work skills, as well as experience of project management or craft and workshop development.

Unsurprisingly, such experience has fostered numerous career paths in the arts. Angus Farquar, the festival's founder, is now artistic director of the nva arts organisation, staging spectacular outdoor events. Former Beltane May Queen, Liz Rankin, is now choreographer at the Royal Shakespeare Company. And long-term performer, Chloe Dear, is producer of innovative shows with the Edinburgh-based "Boilerhouse". She said: "I attribute this success entirely to the experience I gained working with the BFS."

But although Beltane has been shown to contribute a great deal to Edinburgh, this hasn’t been sufficient to satisfy the Council that it’s worth funding. Outraged at this, Angus Farquar said: "Their failure to place one of Scotland's most popular grassroots festivals at the centre of their Festivals' Strategy is a total disgrace." But what might be the reasons for this lack of support?

Some suspect that in a culture encouraging rigorously controlled public events, despite its excellent safety record, the festival's too anarchic, with no explicit start and finish time. Certainly local residents haven't tolerated drumming for one long night each year. And the festival's pagan overtones have disturbed some Kirk members, with fundamentalists staging protests at each festival. But in an era of multiculturalism, with Edinburgh's Hindu community supported with their "Dushera" festival on the same site, this isn't an attitude the Council could publicly avow.

Personally I suspect that the reasons lie more with money. Having always refused to be drawn down the route of obtaining corporate sponsorship, the BFS, a non-profit-making community arts organisation, has long struggled to find alternative ways of meeting the festival's costs. In 1997 a Council grant was axed and since then, costs created by public safety requirements and insurance have spiralled, with the budget reaching £14,000 last year, a sum that ironically is very small in the scale of outdoor festivals.

Despite offers from companies including breweries, the BFS has resolutely rejected such corporate sponsors. Feeling their inevitable result to be fetters on authentic celebration, Beltane's vibrancy bears testimony to the practice of artistic freedom.

This isn’t an attitude the Council shares. In fact all its festivals bed-fellow with business. And thus, although Hogmanay and the Fringe Festival are popular, criticism has been voiced at their over-regulation, resulting in increasingly exclusive and soulless events sponsored by banks. Furthermore, with mostly imported performers, they become rather more economic extravaganzas than the cultural expression of Edinburgh's community.

Nonetheless, in naming what the Beltane Fire Festival has achieved and what Edinburgh will lose in choosing not to support it, I hope to raise people's consciousness that an authentic festival is about much more than hard economics. Many people appreciate the Venice and Rio Carnivals, the "Fallas" festival and "Uphellyar", precisely because they’re of the people, for the people. And it's primarily for this reason that the Festival City shouldn't turn its back on Beltane.