The Flyting

Kirsty Law brings The Flyting to the Scottish Storytelling Centre on Thursday 12 November, as part of the Carrying Stream Festival. Law is a Scots folksinger, and here she's stepping into storytelling, weaving together documented fact, imagined rivalry and a childhood memory of hearing the tale in the very building where it happened.

The story at the centre is the flyting between Robert Burns and Walter Scott. History says they met only once, at a salon in the Sciennes home of Adam Fergusson. But the School of Scottish Studies archives hold another version, told by a Scottish Traveller, of a fantastical gathering of 'all the great writers' locked in poetic flyting until tragedy strikes. Law works with both versions, and the performance becomes a meditation on truth and fiction, and on the ordinary people who carry on Scotland's living tradition.

It's part of the Carrying Stream Festival 2026, which grew out of the Edinburgh Folk Club. The festival takes its name from the 'Carrying Stream' — the organic route by which music, song, spoken word and culture are passed from person to person and from generation to generation. That's a fitting frame for a show that looks at how a story changes as it's told, and who keeps it alive.

The Flyting runs in the Netherbow Theatre, 43-45 High St, Edinburgh EH1 1SR. It starts at 7pm and runs for an hour. Tickets are £14.00, with a handling fee of £1.25 per ticket, capped at four.