The sole-sizzling skill will be taught as one of the additional attractions at this autumn’s Scottish Borders Walking Festival.

Organisers launched the festival’s website at the end of last month and, along with more than 60 hikes around the region, they have come up with extra activities.

Project manager of the Southern Uplands Partnership, the main organisers of the event, Pip Tabor said: “This year’s festival promises to be the biggest and best yet. With such an imaginative and wide-ranging programme, we are confident that we will see yet another year-on-year increase in the numbers of people taking part”.

Anyone wanting to learn to walk on fire can sign up and, after four hours’ training, can expect to walk barefoot across a bed of red-hot coals.

Other new attractions include DNA testing when festival-goers can find out about their parents’ ancestry. Anyone interested needs to book online before July 24 to receive a testing kit. Saliva will reveal whether you come from Norse Vikings, Picts, Neolithic farmers, aboriginal Brythonic people or someone even more exotic and Dr James F. Wilson, a Royal Society Research Fellow at Edinburgh University will give personal results in one-on-one meetings. He will also be giving a presentation on DNA and ancestors.

And there is the opportunity, too, to learn Nordic walking – hiking with poles to work the upper body and burn more calories.

Snappers will be keen to join Innerleithen photographer Graham Riddell, who specialises in local landscape and nature photography, for tips on his photography walk through Hawick’s Wilton Lodge Park.

And there will be a gala dinner using Borders produce at Ferniehirst Castle, home of the Kerrs since 1457 and also known as ‘Scotland’s Frontier Fortress’.

Archaeologist Dr Christopher Bowles will speak about the Dark Ages on Dere Street which linked Hadrians Wall with the Forth. There will be mill tours at Lochcarron of Scotland explaining textile production.