Earlier in the month, Edinburgh City Council said that it had banned the Beltane Fire Festival - the one festival in Edinburgh's busy tourist calendar that isn't dependent on corporate sponsorship and council grants - for 'safety reasons'. Apparently one little spark or a discarded cigarette butt and all the vegetation on Calton Hill would have burnt to a cinder - so a Fire Festival would obviously have been out of the question.
Luckily however, Scotland's monsoon season kicked in in late April, and Edinburgh was drenched in a torrential downpour that turned the hill into a sodden moor and put the lie to that excuse. It didn't make a difference to Edinburgh City Council though - the ban was to go ahead no matter what, and the citizens of Edinburgh had to stump up a bill for £2,000 to seal off the hill for these 'safety reasons', presumably in case any fiendish heathen pagan types were going to try climbing the hill and holding some kind of unlicensed and unauthorised wiccan ritual. Just as well. If we let witches and pagans and wiccans and druids and whathaveyou congregate on hills whenever they like, they'd probably just turn people into newts and toads at random. God knows how Edinburgh has survived the Beltane Festival for the last 15 years without being hit by a plague of amphibians of one sort or another....

I arrived at the Waterloo Place entrance to Calton Hill sometime around 11pm to find a picket of 20 or 30 protesters - some of whom were revellers from outside Edinburgh who'd turned up not realising that the Beltane Festival was to be cancelled this year. This year, a fair amount of effort was put into making the hill look closed. There were barriers padlocked across the entrance, a carload of security guards from Rock Steady Security were behind each entrance, and a couple of vanloads of cops drove past regularly to 'monitor the situation'.

There was something fishy about this situation though. When questioned, the security guards behind the barriers seemed particularly hazy on what gave them the legal right to stop people entering public property. 'The council' said one. When it was pointed out that even the council needed legal authority to stop people using a public right-of-way, she just walked away.
Another security drone, when pressed, finally scraped together enough neurons to grunt 'bye-law'. 'Which bye-law?' I asked. 'bye-law' he grunted again. It seemed a bit cruel and pointless to try taxing this particular specimen's cognitive abilities any further than that.

The security people didn't seem too worried when two witches entered the hill by climbing the wall next to the barrier to harangue the guards about denying them access to their sacred site. The women weren't ejected, or arrested, and neither were the police called.

And then there was the barrier itself. It looked imposing enough, two six-foot by eight-foot metal wire barriers padlocked to each other at the middle. The right-hand barrier was padlocked to a lamp-post as well. On the left hand-side, though, the barrier just seemed to be jammed in behind a lamp-post with nothing fixing it in place. In fact, when we tried moving it, we found there WAS nothing fixing it in place. We dislodged it, and were a bit surprised that neither the security guards in front, nor the two vanloads of cops lifted a finger to stop us. So the barrier was lifted up and pushed to one side and still, neither the cops nor the security guards batted an eyelid. A small number of us then entered Calton Hill in full view of the security guards and two vanloads of cops, not one of whom made even a token effort to stop us. We ended up in a few small groups, each of which spent the start of Beltane in our own fashion.

Talking to the security guards on the hill (there wasn't much else to do up there, and most of the guards turned out to be very friendly and sympathetic, it must be said) one of them let slip that they had been ordered not to stop anyone entering Calton Hill. Which begs the obvious question: What on earth were they there for? The council could have saved the taxpayer hundreds of pounds by deploying a series of life-sized cardboard cut-out photographs of security guards to do the same ridiculous job for a fraction of the cost.

According to the Edinburgh Evening News, Lothian and Borders Police claimed that twelve people climbed the hill, and left peacefully after being told by the police to go. I won't dispute the number (Other than security guards, I remember seeing eight people on the hill, though I heard reports that dozens more showed up in the wee small hours) but I didn't see one policeman while on that hill, nor was I told to leave by the security guards. The reverse, in fact. Some of them seemed desperate to have someone to talk to rather than spend 12 hours standing watch on an empty, soggy hill. Presumably the Chief Constable preferred telling a little white lie to the press rather than get a bollocking from whichever bunch of councillors he has to report to.

It seems that this 'ban' didn't really happen. It was a bluff. The authorities probably realised that banning access to public ground (or even properly securing the barriers) wouldn't stand up to scrutiny in a court of law, so when we physically challenged it by removing the obstacles placed along a public footpath, they stepped back, and let us do what we wanted.

Unfortunately, thousands of people had already been deterred from showing up by the publicity and/or rain, and at least couple of hundred had come as far as the entrances to Calton Hill before turning back. Next year we'll know better, and if they try the same trick again, we'll be ready for them. The Beltane Festival will take place next year, ban or no ban.

There's a wider lesson here I think - until just before midnight, no-one had thought of simply removing the barrier. Before then, the efforts to reclaim the hill had been directed at opposing the display of authority by those in power, and not at gaining access to the hill itself. We'd assumed, because of our Pavlovian deference conditioning towards symbols of power, that Calton Hill was closed because it looked closed. In future, don't assume these things. Next time your path is blocked by a police officer or a security guard, make her explain exactly, with reference to common law and statute book, what gives her the right to do so. You never know, you might be pleasantly surprised...