Loony Dook
annual event in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
The Loony Dook is an annual event held on New Year's Day in which people dive into the freezing waters of the Firth of Forth at South Queensferry (north of Edinburgh, Scotland), often in fancy dress.
Course of events
On New Year's Day, typically in the morning (but times vary according to tides), Many dookers first take part in the Dookers' Fancy Dress Parade, leading from the Hawes car park to the old mole. Spectators cheer on the participants at various vantage points.
The Dookers are then greeted by bagpipe pipers and warmed with bowls of "energising porridge", prior to plunging themselves into the freezing Firth of Forth.
History
The event was conceived in 1986 as a joking suggestion by three locals for a New Year's Day hangover cure. The following year, it was decided to repeat the event for charity.
After a few years of only local significance, the event gradually grew in the 1990s, both in popularity and number of participants. The growth accelerated after the event began to be mentioned in the official Edinburgh Hogmanay publicity material and got a boost when the Millennium edition was broadcast live by the BBC.
Originally organised by locals and starting from the Moorings pub (now the Inchcolm), factors such as increased crowds, safety issues and popularity necessitated a different handling. As a consequence, the events from 2009 onwards were professionally handled by event managers Unique Events. Being the organisers of the Edinburgh Hogmanay Festival, they included the Loony Dook into the latter from 2011.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q23585850. Authority coordinates are 55.993, -3.387. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1986, 2009 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Loony Dook” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.