Beltain Fire Festival at Butser Ancient Farm | 2026 Highlights

It’s Beltain season! The ancient Celtic festival celebrated at the beginning of summer, and possibly even the origins of May Day. Every year, we celebrate this wonderful festival with an afternoon and evening of music, mead, merriment, and of course, the burning of our 30ft wickerman. Here’s to good company and sunny days! This year’s wickerman design is based on the Amesbury Archer, an early Bronze Age man whose grave was discovered near Stonehenge in 2002. Around 100 objects were found in the grave, including the complete skeleton of a man, three copper knives, two small gold hair tresses, two sandstone wristguards to protect his wrists from the bow string, 16 flint arrowheads, one shale ring and five pots. The wickerman was made by artistic duo Mark and Rebecca Ford of Two Circles Design: www.twocirclesdesign.co.uk Thank you to everyone who joined us for this wonderful event! To everyone who made it out, to all our visitors and volunteers and supporters here, thank you for making things like this possible. ▬ About Us ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Butser Ancient Farm is an open-air experimental archaeology museum and active research centre, learning about the past by recreating it. Our experiments are world-renowned, and our buildings include a Roman villa, Celtic village, Stone Age farm and Saxon halls — all reconstructed from real UK archaeology, and open to be explored! We do everything we can do share our passion for the past, from visitor opening and school groups to filming our experiments for bitesize documentaries. ▬ Support Us ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Thanks to our supporters, we can continue to explore the cutting-edge of experimental archaeology, expand our understanding of the distant past, and pass our passion for archaeology onto the next generation. Visit www.butserancientfarm.co.uk/butserplus to learn more! ▬ Find Us Elsewhere! ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ ► Facebook: / butserancientfarm ► Bluesky: / butserancientfarm.co.uk ► Instagram: / butserancientfarm ► Website: www.butserancientfarm.co.uk #asmr #accidentalasmr #archaeology #experimentalarchaeology #beltane