Celebrating Beltane

... and a recipe for strawberry mint loaf cake 🍓

This coming Thursday, 1st May, is Beltane in the Celtic calendar: the mid-point between the Spring Equinox (Ostara) and Summer Solstice (Litha) here in the Northern Hemisphere. The festival has been celebrated for thousands of years and marks the official start of Summer in the Celtic Wheel of the Year. It was an important part of the farming calendar in the past, as at this time livestock would have been put out to pasture to graze, marking the start of the growing seasons of abundance. In Scotland, greenery was gathered to display and Beltane “bannocks” were baked. With so much seasonal beauty, this moment at the start of May invites us to pause and take stock, to notice nature around us and mark the turn of the year. Here are some things I’ll be making and doing to celebrate Beltane this week.

Making with Flowers

There are so many beautiful flowers coming into season just in time for Beltane: the lilacs, bluebells, forget-me-nots, tulips and ranunculus are all blooming, with lily of the valley and peonies soon hot on their heels. This is really the height of Spring in the garden. This month I have plans to make some pressed flower botanical imprints using air-dry clay to try and capture the fleeting beauty of those Spring blooms.

I’ll also be making my annual jam jar posies for anonymous gifting, which is another Beltane tradition and something I write about in my book, Slow Seasons. This year I’m looking forward to making them together with some lovely members of the seasonal living community here in Scotland as I will be sharing a Spring posy workshop and reading from Slow Seasons as part of a Slow Living Beltane Retreat. I’m co-hosting the half-day retreat with Aimée from Wild Tide Yoga in the beautiful Tyninghame Village Hall in East Lothian: Aimée will be leading yoga and breathwork sessions and then I’ll guide you to make your own stunning Spring posy with flowers grown in Edinburgh by Ochre Botanical Studios! The lovely Night Owl Books will be selling signed copies of my book too.

If you’re local, I’d so love it if you could join us - there are a few tickets left, all the details and tickets are here. Here’s a pic of one I made earlier at Ochre’s Garden this afternoon:

Rituals of Light

Like many of the festivals in the Celtic Wheel, Beltane celebrates light and fire. The hearth fire would be extinguished and a new, communal fire lit in a Beltane bonfire, which was then used to light each of the hearths in the community. This symbolised connection and the growing power of the sun, and was a moment for the community to reflect following the darker seasons. Rituals took place around the fire too, families circling and jumping over the flames for luck and protection, even leading animals around and over the fire before they re-entered the fields. As I think it’s meant to be too warm here in the UK to have the stove on this week, I’ll be lighting the candles as a symbolic nod to the day instead, and taking time to reflect on the last six weeks - including practising gratitude and noting recent glimmers - and engage in some gentle planning for the Summer months with all their growth and abundance to come.

Linger Beneath the Blossom

We are lucky here in Edinburgh to live in reach of many parks, nature reserves and woodlands to enjoy the blossom and leaves unfurling. The Meadows is at peak blossom this week, and though I’ve found any excuse to take them in en route to anywhere I go, I’m going to make sure I take time to really linger beneath the blossom over the coming days, even just for five minutes with a flask of tea, before it disappears for another year. In an ideal world I’d be packing a picnic basket and taking my time over the ritual of preparing some treats; one of my favourite sections of Slow Seasons to write was the picnic section in the Beltane chapter, including recipes for jam jar Eton mess, pesto pastries and my family scone recipe. A lot of fun was had testing for this chapter! I hope you can take some time to enjoy the blossom this week, whether with a full-blown picnic or a takeaway coffee.

Go on a Bluebell Walk

In the past, Beltane was often celebrated with huge community gatherings and rituals on hills; here in Edinburgh, locals would head to Arthur’s Seat to revel in the light of Summer and more recently they gather at Calton Hill for the Beltane Fire Festival. One of my favourite hilly walks at this time of year is one of the much more unassuming spots in Edinburgh - Ravelstone Woods, the site of an old quarry and home to thousands of bluebells every May. This year will be extra special to take Baby L, as last year we had a memorable trip when I was heavily pregnant; we sat with a flask of tea and wondered what the coming months would bring. Now he’s here, a bundle of crawling, waving, pointing, babbling, nature-loving energy and I can’t wait to show him our special bluebell wood. The Woodland Trust has a great list of places with spectacular bluebell displays, so I hope you can find one near you too. Picture below of a very pregnant me from last year taken by Filminburgh.

Strawberry Mint Loaf Cake

I’m very excited for the first British strawberries to arrive this month, a happy event that coincides with this Beltane time of year. I also spotted that the first wild strawberry flowers are out in the communal garden, lovely in jam jar posies and to eat straight from the plant once they ripen! If you’ve not tried strawberries and mint together before, I heartily recommend them – the mint really ramps up the strawberries’ fresh sweetness. In this cake the mint is infused in the milk for the batter and the icing topping, giving an aromatic twist to proceedings.

You will need:

120g caster sugar
120g butter
90g self-raising flour
30g ground almonds
120g strawberries, chopped
2 large, free-range eggs
2 tbsp mint-infused milk (infuse one sprig of mint in 4 tbsp milk by bringing it just to the boil with the mint and leaving it at least 15 minutes to infuse)
For the icing:
45g icing sugar
juice of one strawberry (mash it in a separate bowl and strain off the liquid)
1 tsp mint-infused milk.

Preheat the oven to 160C Fan. Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the mint-infused milk and beat again. Add the eggs one at a time with a little flour. Fold in the remaining flour and ground almonds. Fold through the strawberries until just incorporated.

Spoon evenly into a greased and lined loaf tin and level the surface. Bake for 40 – 45 minutes until golden brown and a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean. Allow to cool a little in the tin, then turn out and leave to cool completely on a wire rack. Drizzle with the icing (made by mixing the icing sugar with one tsp of mint-infused milk and the juice of a mashed strawberry) and top with fresh strawberries and fresh mint to decorate.

If you enjoy my monthly seasonal newsletters, do consider joining us in my paid subscriber community for weekly posts. Together in this wee corner of the Internet we are creating a beautiful community of like-minded old souls who want to slow down, simplify and connect with the seasons. Here’s a flavour of what I’ve been posting over there this last month:

Rosie Makes: Chocolate Burnt Basque Cheesecake

My Hot Cross Bun Recipe and Setting the Spring Table

Hand Painted Eggs for Easter

Sow, Grow, Harvest, Rest Reading Group: April

And if you’ve enjoyed my newsletter I’d love it if you could share it too to help me spread the word:

Thanks so much for reading, and see you next month xxx

p.s. Slow Seasons is filled with seasonal crafts, recipes, nature notes and celebrations inspired by my Scottish heritage and if you enjoy this newsletter I think you’ll love it! I follow the progress of the year through each mini season, from Imbolc at the start of the year to Yule at the end and the book is beautifully illustrated by Holly Ovenden throughout.

You can read more about it in this post and you can order ‘Slow Seasons’ here.