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Folklife Festival: Scottish Invasion

Hamish Moore of Dunkeld, Scotland, shows off his handmade pipes at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
Danielle Wagner, NPR News /
Hamish Moore of Dunkeld, Scotland, shows off his handmade pipes at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

In the days leading up to the Fourth of July, visitors to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., were greeted by a miniature castle, a scaled down replica of the Road Hole at St. Andrews golf course, haggis burgers, barrels of aromatic single malt and the pervasive bleating of pipes.

It's all a part of the Smithsonian's annual Folklife Festival. Every year, the Smithsonian features the folk arts and traditions of a handful of countries or regions. This year, the focus is on Mali, Appalachia and Scotland. NPR's Robert Siegel, host of All Things Considered, makes a visit to the Scottish festival to report on its sights and sounds.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Robert Siegel
Prior to his retirement, Robert Siegel was the senior host of NPR's award-winning evening newsmagazine All Things Considered. With 40 years of experience working in radio news, Siegel hosted the country's most-listened-to, afternoon-drive-time news radio program and reported on stories and happenings all over the globe, and reported from a variety of locations across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. He signed off in his final broadcast of All Things Considered on January 5, 2018.