The first thing you notice is the fire.

On a late October night in Trim, County Meath, the air carries the smell of woodsmoke, and torches flare against the medieval castle walls.

A crowd gathers, waiting. Some are bundled in coats against the cold, others wear horns or masks. Children dart between their parents’ legs.

A line of drummers beat a slow rhythm, and a procession emerges: masked figures, cloaked performers, creatures half-human and half-supernatural.

Moving as though they’re stepping out of the shadows. They dance around the bonfire.

This is the Púca Festival, Ireland’s attempt to reimagine Halloween not as imported Americana but as something ancient that has its roots in the Celtic New Year, Samhain.

The festival takes its name from the púca, a shapeshifting spirit in Irish folklore that can appear as a horse, a goat, or a shadow in the hedgerows.

Like its namesake, the festival shifts shape depending on what you seek.

For some, it is a ritual revival: the relighting of the Samhain fire at the Hill of Ward in Athboy, the place where, according to tradition, communities once gathered to extinguish their hearths and rekindle them from a communal blaze.

For others, it is a modern cultural festival: music, comedy, food, and storytelling spread across venues in Trim and Athboy. 

The festival has a marketplace of curiosities. Alongside food stalls selling seasonal fare, I came across an enclosure where visitors could pose with birds of prey. The handlers looked as if they had wandered straight from Game of Thrones, tabarded, cloaked and commanding with owls on their arm and a menagerie of other impressive birds behind them.

Amongst them a striking creature: a raven, glossy black and inquisitive, which, I was told, rather ominously, could speak, but only when it felt like it.

Delights like this sit alongside the broader programme. There are comedians trying their sets in marquees, fire dancing circus performers in big-top, bands filling the night with music, and storytellers summoning ancient tales in the corners of pubs. In its best moments, Púca is transportive: a reminder that Halloween wasn’t always plastic masks and sweets, but a liminal time when the old year died and the new one began.

Yet for a few, not everything is spellbinding.

Some visitors, lured by glossy advertising, find the festival sparser than expected. Between venues, there can be lulls where not much happens.

Still, you could use this time to wander around the decorated towns of Trim and Athboy. Logistics sometimes frustrate — parking left more than one traveller grumbling, they tell me, and those hoping for a buzzing, big music-festival atmosphere may be underwhelmed.

While headline acts like Gavin James, Kingfisher and BellX1 drew huge and involved crowds, away from the mainstage, the smaller ticketed workshops offer something truly immersive.

For a few euros, I clumsily joined the circus, then joined a storytelling walk through medieval farmland with a folklorist, where mischievous púca appeared from the hedgerows. It was fun, a bit unnerving, and I left having learned a lot about the history of Samhain.

That mix of magic and unevenness defines the festival. First launched in 2019, it’s still relatively young, and while it has already won international recognition – including the Grand Pinnacle Award from the International Festival and Events Association in 2024 – it doesn’t always deliver consistently.

On paper, it looks world-class. On the ground, it’s a little more vision in progress. I get the impression that it will strengthen as it grows.

The fairest way to approach Púca may be not as a conventional festival but as a ritual pageant with modern trimmings. The torchlit ceremonies, the bonfire at the Hill of Ward, the myth-infused performances – these are its heart. The food markets, the bird handlers, storytellers and live acts orbit around them.

To judge it by the standards of Glastonbury or Oktoberfest is to miss the point. To enter it as you would listen to a folktale – patient, and open – is to discover its strength.

Púca reminds visitors that the origins of Halloween began here, as Samhain, a moment when the veil between the living and the dead was at its thinnest.

That act of cultural reclamation carries weight. In Trim, under the looming walls of the Norman castle, Halloween is no longer a global export; it is once again a local ritual, spoken in the language of myth and fire.

Still, the festival still must reckon with the gap between vision and delivery.

Visitors who pay for tickets expect a fuller schedule, smoother logistics, and better value. Word of mouth matters. Funnily enough, while the spirit of Halloween raged on in Trim last year, residents of Dublin had been hoaxed into attending a fake Halloween parade that went viral online, hundreds gathered in O’Connell Street for a non-existent procession.

If only they had seen the one at Púca Fest.

Púca Festival is neither a slick entertainment package nor a folkloric reenactment.

It sits in an in-between space, much like the time it honours. To walk its torchlit paths is to glimpse what Halloween meant at the start, and to see a community still negotiating how to bring that past into the present.

For some, that will be enough: gathering around the fire, music, story, community and ritual in the heart of Ireland’s ‘Ancient East’.

If you’re willing to embrace this, there’s really nothing else quite like it.

Rebecca was a guest of Tourism Ireland & Failite Ireland. Púca Festival runs from 30 October to 2 November 2025. Tickets can be bought here.