Below is a list of Irish and Scottish festivals, highland games, and other events with corresponding links, dates, and location. As locations and dates may change, please view the event's website for up to date location, schedule, and fee information. If any changes or corrections are needed, or if you wish to have an event added, please email me.

Note: Past events without updated information listed on the website are moved to the bottom of each table. Once a month events with new dates will be moved to the upcoming section and other information will be updated. This way the most recent upcoming events will be listed first. Links that lead to dead sites will be marked with an asterisk (*) and will be removed after one month.

Click here for the history of this page.

Cornish & Welsh Festivals

Irish & Celtic Festivals & Events

Scottish Festivals, Games, & Other Events

History

In my native Virginia, or at least in the Hampton Roads area, the Celtic scene is a bit minimal, if not nonexistent. There weren't any Irish Fests around, and even through I lived ten to thirty minutes away from the Williamsburg Scottish Festival, I never had the time to make it there. In fact the only real Celtic music scene was a local band called Coyote Run which played monthly at a local church, with scattered shows elsewhere in the Hampton Roads area. But even this went away as their popularity grew and they started to tour up and down the East Coast. So I was basically limited to listening to the Celtic music I had downloaded or the steaming radio stations (mainly Live Ireland and the now defunct Celtic Grove radio) over the Internet.

Well that all changed one night in the fall of 2005. The previous summer, I had left the little corner of Virginia where I had lived all my life and moved up to the Chicago area. One Monday night, NPR was playing jazz, which I don't normally listen to, so I decided to flip through the stations. And lo and behold, I came across a station that was playing Celtic music. After listening to the first song I was amazed that the Celtic music continued. Although, I didn't remember to get the call sign I found the station again a couple of weeks later. And then I learned that the station was WDCB 90.9 FM, and the show was Blarney on the Air. I also determined that they stream online every Monday between 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM CST. So ever since then, I've listened to most every show that I can catch. (Blarney on the Air continues to this day every Monday between 7:00 and 8:00 CST, with Ireland Tonight streaming from 8:00 to 9:00 CST.)

So what does this have to do with Fests? Well besides playing good music, the dialogue between the two hosts was very informative as well as amusing. I learned that there are events dedicated to Celtic music. So I started writing down the names of the fests they mentioned and found websites for them. This list grew as one page would link to another, which would link to another, and so forth. These pages are linked below for reference purposes: