ABSTRACT
The history of the ancient British and Irish year has never been made the subject of a sustained study by any expert in early Irish or Welsh literature, and what has been written upon it has consisted of a paragraph or two provided almost by default, usually in the works of scholars who were not primarily expert in literary sources at all. Most of the academic books upon the Celts produced for a general readership in the 1950s and 1960s made no reference to the subject. During the next twenty-five years, the subject was once again ignored by some of the standard textbooks upon ancient Celtic culture. Midsummer bonfires, with much the same rituals, are recorded all over England, Wales, Ireland, Lowland Scotland, and the Northern Isles, with complete irrelevance to boundaries between Celtic areas and others; but they are apparently not mentioned in the Gaelic speaking parts of Scotland.
