Orzechs, continued: St. Andrews Highland Games: Highland Experience in the Lowlands of Scotland

Living in Dundee, we are relatively close to the Highlands. Within an hour's drive you could probably reach several Highland villages; within three hours you could be to but all but the most remote (although let me tell you, in Scotland there is a lot of "remote"). Even closer, and offering one of the same Highland amenities - namely, Highland Games, is St. Andrews. Famous for golf and the University, St. Andrews is also quite international for a Scottish town of its size (i.e., tiny) and this may be why they host a Highland Games - a Scottish traditional event for their international visitors. This year was the 30th annual Highland Games, and we went along to see what it was about.

The program advertised Heavy Events, Cycling, Running, Solo Piping, Tug of War, Stalls, Highland Dancing, Refreshment Tent, Mini Fun Fair, and City of St. Andrews Pipe Band. We saw all of the above, except for solo piping, which didn't seem to be happening (and you'd think that if there were bagpipes, we would have heard them). Paul enjoyed the running events- apparently Scots excel at middle distances, so it brought him back to his high school running days of the 400 and the 800, and he spent time trying to figure out the handicapping system (we'd never seen running handicapped before, but officials placed people on the track based on their speediness, resulting in many close races).

Also not mentioned until we got there, and probably not typical of all Highland Games: they had a visitor-participation part in the middle of the games. About 3 pm, they called for children to participate in races based on their sex and age - starting with girls under 5 and working their way up to approximately 12 year-old boys. Both the girls ran (although Claire didn't quite have the concept, she kept looking back at me like, "Mom, aren't you coming too?") and won sweeties (candy) as a prize. Then they had the International visitors race - for the ladies first, then men. The only requirements were that you couldn't live in the UK, and you had to be able to do one circuit of the track (by this time Paul had figured out that this was about 300 meters).

Below are a few pictures of the events of the day, in the approximate order that they unfolded.

The last event we saw was the tossing of the caber, a truly amazing event where the heavy competitors (read: large men) heft a pole more than three times their height (the announcer said around 20 feet, similar to a tree trunk or telephone pole) and throw it not for distance, but for style - while standing on an imaginary clock face at 6 o'clock, they lift it by the wide/heavy end and flip it so the narrow end lands at 12 o'clock. Of the 8 competitors we saw, only 2 could toss the caber with any consistency. More often, they would toss it and instead of falling forward toward 12 o'clock, it would fall backward toward 6 o'clock (and the competitor). Because the track and field events took place on the same field (heavy events in the middle with running/cycling tack around them) there was also a hair-raising moment when a youth cyclist obliviously rode too close to the caber-tossing event - the heavy events announcer, mild-mannered until then, stopped mid-commentary to yell at the boy to get out of the way - I believe his exact words, miked for all to hear, were something like, "Out of the way! If that falls on you, you'll be turned into sausages!"