Celebrating Scotland’s Living Traditions: UNESCO’s International Day of the Intangible Cultural Heritage

POSTED ON October 17, 2025

Edinburgh’s stories live on — celebrating Intangible Cultural Heritage today

On 17 October 2025, UNESCO will mark the second International Day of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, inviting communities and organisations worldwide to celebrate the living traditions that define our shared cultural life. For Edinburgh and Scotland, this occasion offers an opportunity to look beyond monuments and museums and recognise the vital practices, skills, and stories that connect people to place and to one another.

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) refers to the living expressions of culture passed from generation to generation, including oral storytelling, traditional music and dance, community festivals, languages, craftsmanship, and local knowledge. Unlike buildings or artefacts, these forms of heritage endure only through active participation, transmission, and adaptation. Although the United Kingdom has yet to ratify UNESCO’s 2003 Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, Scottish organisations such as Museums Galleries Scotland and Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland are aligning with its principles, helping communities document and sustain their traditions.

In July 2025, Museums Galleries Scotland launched Protection Through Connection: Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in Scotland, a new initiative supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The project strengthens links between cultural institutions and communities that practise traditional knowledge. Its first phase focuses on gathering information for a National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage, inviting contributions from across Scotland through the ICH Scotland Wiki. In the coming months, five partnership projects will receive up to £10,000 each to develop collaborations between heritage venues and those who maintain traditional skills or customs. This initiative marks a significant step toward integrating living heritage into national cultural policy.

Across Scotland, intangible heritage is diverse and distinctive, encompassing Gaelic storytelling, community ceilidhs, seasonal festivals, and crafts like thatching, blacksmithing, and stone carving. Events such as the Scottish International Storytelling Festival and Edinburgh’s Beltane Fire Festival show how traditions can be reinterpreted for contemporary audiences while retaining their cultural roots. Yet these traditions are fragile. Recent reports indicate a significant decline in the number of trained thatchers, stonemasons, and stained-glass conservators in Scotland, threatening the transmission of skills essential to both cultural and built heritage.

In Edinburgh, living heritage takes many forms. The city’s Hogmanay celebrations draw on ancient Scottish customs of renewal and communal gathering, reinforcing Edinburgh’s role as a cultural hub. The Beltane Fire Festival, revived in the late twentieth century, blends art, ritual, and performance in a modern expression of collective creativity. The revival of Gaelic and Scots language initiatives, alongside storytelling sessions and folk music networks, underscores the importance of linguistic and musical traditions to the city’s identity. The Scottish International Storytelling Festival (SISF), running from 22 October to 1 November 2025, brings storytellers from near and far into Edinburgh and other venues across Scotland, offering a programme of performances, workshops, and community events. Rooted in oral tradition, the festival illustrates how storytelling continues to thrive as a living, evolving heritage in the city.

Much of Edinburgh’s intangible heritage is also written into its urban fabric, from the echoes of trade and craft in its historic street names to the folklore attached to its closes and wynds. Names such as Fleshmarket Close, Candlemaker Row, and Bread Street speak of the city’s former trades, markets, and everyday life: reminders that stories of work, language, and community remain embedded in place as well as memory.

For the Cockburn Association, the International Day of the Intangible Cultural Heritage is a reminder that safeguarding Edinburgh’s identity involves more than protecting its built environment. The Association’s civic mission places equal importance on the social and cultural life that animates the city’s streets, closes, and communities. In a rapidly changing city, pressures such as tourism and urban development can strain the continuity of traditions, making initiatives like Protection Through Connection vital to sustaining Edinburgh’s cultural vitality.

The Cockburn Association has also been celebrating Edinburgh’s living heritage through a series of short videos produced with support from the Edinburgh 900 programme. Each film explores a different story from the city’s past and present — from the origins of street names to the traditions that give meaning to everyday places. Our latest short, Ever wondered where the name “Fleshmarket Close” comes from?, takes viewers along one of the Old Town’s most atmospheric routes. You can watch it, along with other current and future videos, on our Instagram and Facebook pages.

As UNESCO’s observance gains recognition, it provides a framework for integrating living heritage into urban policy, cultural planning, and education. The Cockburn Association encourages residents, practitioners, and local groups to share examples of intangible cultural heritage through the ICH Scotland Wiki , whether that means storytelling traditions, craft skills, or community festivals. A city might be well preserved, but it also needs to be culturally active: heritage must be lived through participation, creativity, and intergenerational connection. By elevating and supporting these living traditions, Edinburgh can remain not only architecturally distinctive but also culturally vibrant, a city whose heritage continues to evolve through the voices of its people.

 

Further Reading

Image: Fleshmarket Close, Edinburgh (BM 1863,0214.1457), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fleshmarket_Close,Edinburgh(BM_1863,0214.1457).jpg

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