Rattray's: Beltane's Fire Smooth Contrast (9mm) Tobacco Pipe

One of the four seasonal festivals in Celtic cultures, Beltane falls on the night of April 30th, celebrating the start of summer, and along with Samhain on October 31st, is thought to have been the most important of the Gaelic seasonal festivals. Traditionally, Beltane is a celebration of fertile land and coincided with the time of year livestock would have been put out to pasture, but modern reinterpretations of the ancient tradition are still enacted, with Edinburgh's Beltane Fire Festival among the largest current adaptations, attracting nearly 10,000 spectators each year. The word beltane loosely translates to "bright fire," and the festival centers around a massive bonfire, symbolizing the healing and purifying of the land as it transitions from winter.

Rattray's Beltane's Fire series commemorates this historic celebration with a singular pipe shape that the Scottish marque revived from its early-1900s catalogs. A classic Bullmoose design, this piece exhibits the form's characteristically muscular proportions but in convenient overall size, combining the stoutness of the traditional Author with the beadlined bowl of a Rhodesian. A metallic accent adorns the shank end, and fitting with the Beltane motif, this pipe comes complete with three acrylic stems: one reserved and jet-black, but the other two offering a vibrant, fiery motif with mouthpieces of red and yellow.

Note: While all of our other pipes are photographed individually, these are not, and you may expect some reasonable cosmetic variation between the example we've photographed and the pipe you've received.