Rise & Shine 2026
For the 5th year in a row, the UNESCO RIELA team co-organised the Rise & Shine Festival at the Scottish Crannog Centre.
The Rise and Shine festival is an event with hands on activity and open-air performances, hosted by The Scottish Crannog Centre and the UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages, and Arts (UNESCO RIELA). Meet craftspeople, artists and musicians from across Scotland and Internationally, to celebrate sustainable craft and lifestyles and reflect on how to build sustainable and resilient communities. The festival will focus on climate justice, the refugee crisis, and sustainable traditions, whilst bringing people together on the banks of the beautiful Loch Tay, to reconnect, reflect and respond, in a quiet space of craft and music.
This year's festival took place on 15 & 16 August 2026.
For an impression of this year, please see the video's on the Scottish Crannog Centre's Facebook page. As well as the photo album below (click on the image).
Contributions from the UNESCO RIELA team were:
* Oud performance by Belal Saleh
* Iranian music performance by Saeed Rezazadeh
* Friends of Scottish Settlers welcome in your language workshop
* Solo Way choir performance
* Syeda Sadaf Zaidi tie-dye banner workshop
* Paria Goodarzi Iranian-inspired weaving and bread making workshop
* Christina Kyriakidou and the Central and West Integration Network workshop on using natural materials to create ephemeral art work. See also their blog post about the weekend.
* Hyab Yohannes workshop Listening to Land: Belonging, Care and Sustainable Communities.
* Malini Chakrabarty decorating plant pots workshop
* Eilidh & Rachel Morley workshop creating impressions from found objects
* Nerea Bello with a ring-making workshop
* Hsiao-Chang Wang with a workshop on creating (Chinese) characters
* Lupin Lin with a workshop on traditional Taiwanese clay frogs
* Alison Phipps with poetry and an Eritrean coffee ceremony
* Tawona Sitholé with poetry and storytelling
* Leena Nammari Palestinian Tatreez workshop
* Marta Adamowicz linocut stamp making workshop
* Gordon Kerr and Catriona MacInnes performance of poetry from Anton Floyd's book Depositions
You might also want to have a look at Alison Phipps' article in the National about the festival, entitled Hate is winning out in so many places – but not here.
Rise & Shine 2025
The Rise & Shine Festival was, once again, a huge success, thanks to the efforts of all involved. To get an impression of the event, please see the photos below, taken by Karen Gordon.
To view in your browser, please click this direct link to the photo album.
Once again we have teamed up with the Scottish Crannog Centre to organise the annual Rise & Shine festival up at their fantastic centre on the shores of Loch Tay.
Expect a weekend filled with family fun, workshops, food and good company. Contributions to look out for:
UNESCO RIELA Affiliate Artist Christine Kammerer will run a singing workshop.
The Monuments for Equality team will examine connections between time, power and public space by facilitating platforms for dialogue and diverse forms of creative practice. Expect to get your hands on a piece of clay!
Soloway Choir will perform Ukrainian songs all weekend.
Samira Hassanzade and friends will be serving Azerbaijani treats on the Saturday.
Sarah Stewart and Affiliate Artist Nerea Bello will be hosting a workshop that invites people into gentle making and meaningful exchange, using fabric, thread, and found materials from the land and the water’s edge.
Hyab Yohannes will be serving our by now signature Eritrean coffee!
Hope Wang and Lupin Lin will be creating images using leaves found at the centre.
Pinar Aksu will be leading a cross-stitch workshop creating messages of hope.
Affiliate Artist Martha Orbach will bring her weaving knowledge to teach visitors how to make woven bracelets and baskets, using natural materials.
BOOK YOUR TICKET in advance, to make sure you won't miss this incredible festival of community and connections!
Rise & Shine Festival 2024
The festival has ended, but photographer Karen Gordon managed to capture it wonderfully. You can view the photo gallery here or click on the image below.
Do also read Nerea Bello's blog post about her experience hosting a workshop at the festival.
UNESCO RILA, Maryhill Integration Network (MIN) and the Scottish Crannog Centre are proud to present Rise and Shine, a gathering of goodness!
In March 2024, the Crannog Centre opened their new site on the north banks of Loch Tay and they are in the process of rebuilding their village and all the iron age structures. For the third annual Rise and Shine Festival, they invited us to come and view the new site and museum, as well as join in for the festival activities.
Rise and Shine was a weekend full of optimism, love, mischief, smiles, and sharing cultures. Visitors were treated to a variety of different activities, including:
- Music from Solo Way Ukrainian Choir, MIN's Joyous Choir, and Rena Gertz
- An Azerbaijani tea ceremony
- Art workshops
- Theatre craft
- Foods to try from various cultures
- An Eritrean coffee ceremony
- Storytelling
- A Rangoli workshop
- Ring making
- Rock art activities
- Raft building
- Group poetry writing
- Traditional Mexican and Scottish games
The Scottish Crannog Centre is an open-air museum on Loch Tay that celebrates life 2500 years ago, the beginnings of how we live today. The museum allows visitors to ‘experience the iron age’ through craft, food, spoken tours, and a unique personalised customer service. Open every day 10am-5pm.
My time at the Scottish Crannog Centre showed another world is possible - article by Alison Phipps for The National
Rise and Shine thoughts from Nerea Bello - blog for the Scottish Crannog Centre
Scottish Crannog Centre website
Rise & Shine Festival 2023
On the 19th and 20th August, the Scottish Crannog Centre hosted their annual Rise and Shine Festival on the shore of Loch Tay, Kenmore.
This second edition of the Rise and Shine festival was a collaboration between the Scottish Crannog Centre and the UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Language and the Arts (UNESCO RILA), with support from the Maryhill Integration Network, Glasgow.
Together we brought together a wealth of craftspeople, storytellers, musicians, theatre makers, visual artist and academics from across Scotland and internationally. Originally grown out of the tragedy of the crannog burning down in June 2021, the festival was a celebration of the resilience of the Crannog team, as well as an opportunity to reflect together on what it means to be a community, on questions around sustainability both in the social and ecological sense, on climate justice and on pre-colonial modes of interacting with one another.
The beautiful shore of Loch Tay in Perthshire recently became part of the UNESCO UK Creative Cities network as City of Craft and Folk Art, a designation that has been extended to the whole county and includes the Scottish Crannog Centre. In this quiet space of craft and music, we reconnected, reflected, shared and learned, together.
There were opportunities to take part in crafts such as prehistoric pottery workshops, Celtic jewellery making, Scottish and Zimbabwean storytelling, forest foraging, and Gaelic poetry.
Other activities included nest making to explore ideas of home, interactive theatre sessions exploring memories, home, and leaving, and Eritrean coffee ceremonies to learn from the Eritrean ways of building sustainable communities. We experienced the sense of connection that comes with talking to each other, making with hands and minds, and sharing food and drink together.
The weekend was full of song, stories, craft and sharing the vibrant cultures within Scotland as we forged new ways to connect to each other and to the planet.
The Scottish Crannog Centre is an open-air museum on Loch Tay that celebrates life 2500 years ago, the beginnings of how we live today. The museum allows visitors to ‘experience the iron age’ through craft, food, spoken tours, and a unique personalised customer service. Open every day 10am-5pm.
Scottish Crannog Centre website
Podcast episode By the fire at the Scottish Crannog Centre part 1
Podcast episode By the fire at the Scottish Crannog Centre part 2
Rise & Shine Festival 2022
The first annual Rise & Shine Festival took place at the Scottish Crannog Centre on 24-25 September 2022.
