Classic camping and music festivals

It’s the quintessential rite of passage when it comes to the festival experience: cheap tent, inadequate sleep, big-name headliners, lots of stages, sunburn and/or trench foot, time of your life. There are many to choose from around Scotland in 2025, including the 10th birthday for Skye Live, where a big tent is perched on The Lump outside Portree in early May and you find a fusion of traditional music, DJs and dance acts.

Later in May, the long-established Knockengorroch festival draws you off-grid near Castle Douglas in Dumfries & Galloway for four days of grassroots folk, dance and world music from the Celtic diaspora. Also doing the south of Scotland proud is The Eden Festival, held in June just outside Moffat. An independent, not-for-profit community effort, they put on music over 10 different stages alongside a kids’ arena, circus tent, comedy, cabaret and workshops.

Celebrating their 15th anniversary, the four-day Kelburn Garden Party in early July takes place near Fairlie on the Ayrshire coast, with seven stages of dance, funk, disco, dub, jazz and blues. Also setting up in the grounds of a castle, this time Lewes Castle in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, HebCelt turns up the volume on contemporary Gaelic and traditional music from home and abroad for four days in mid July. A couple of weeks later Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival near Inverness draws the biggest crowds of all to an expansive, family friendly festival featuring comedy, cabaret and even wrestling along with mainstream music acts and scores of other bands and performers.

New for 2025

It’s one thing to think up a good idea for another festival. It’s quite another to make it happen. Fortunately, there’s sufficient vision, creativity, organisational prowess and determination going around in Scotland to ensure that some fresh events are popping up in different parts of the country in 2025. The New Lanark Film Festival is one, bringing the best of Scotland on screen and local film-makers to the World Heritage Site by the River Clyde in March. Meanwhile, the rolling Border hills between Hawick and Jedburgh is the setting for an ambitious new multi-day music festival called Wastelands at various venues in Glasgow this June, with camping available and three stages showcasing a wide range of trad, folk, jazz and electronica.

A ‘doof’ is an outdoor dance party and July sees the debut of Doof In The Park, with home-town girl Hannah Laing bringing some well-known names in hard house and trance to Camperdown Country Park in Dundee. Also in July, The Garden Party is a family-friendly festival with live music, DJs, wellbeing activities, crafts, storytelling and street food arriving at the Royal Highland Centre at Ingliston by Edinburgh.

Meanwhile the subtle tweak to the name of Back Doune The Rabbit Hole points to a brand-new chapter for the troubled event from a few years back, with the gathering at Port of Menteith in early August now under new ownership but looking to revive the spirit of old with a weekend of music, community and culture. August also sees the arrival of Fun For Life Fest which promises an array of live music, performances, sports, storytelling and games aimed at families in and around Tollcross Park in Glasgow.

Unusual festivals

The evidence of this guide is that there is an immense range of different festivals happening this year in Scotland, essentially covering the full spectrum of arts, culture and entertainment. While labelling anything as ‘unusual’ is undoubtedly subjective, there are still a few events that stand out as particularly distinctive or quirky, but as such they’re also testimony to the diversity and reach of the country’s festival programme.

In March each year the venerable Hippodrome cinema in Bo’ness in West Lothian hosts HippFest, a festival showing silent films, often accompanied by live music, while April sees the Glasgow Festival Of Burlesque celebrating the art of cabaret and burlesque with both performances and workshops.

A lot of the thrill of Edinburgh’s Hidden Door Festival in June is its itinerant location, moving each year to a different disused building and filling it with live music, visual art, dance, film and spoken word performance. This year it happens in a former paper and cardboard manufacturing facility on the outskirts of the city.

While there are slots for almost every conceivable genre of music at different festivals around the country, one of the most distinctive is surely the Oban International Shanty Festival, when sea songs and storytelling take centre stage in the Argyll port over midsummer weekend in June.

For spectacles, it’s hard to beat the Strathaven Balloon Festival in August, where they’ll be hoping for better weather than 2024 to allow the massed hot-air balloons to fly above South Lanarkshire. Later in the month and into early September there are also eye-catching scenes on the Clyde Coast at the annual Largs Viking Festival, where you can catch parades, re-enactments, fireworks and the burning of a long boat.

This article was originally published in The List’s Guide To Scottish Festivals 2025, which is available in print from stockists across Scotland or available to read online; main picture: ReCompose.