Today’s Highland Games were perpetuated by the clans of Northern Scotland, but began far earlier among the Celts of Scotia, the name Latin writers gave Ireland.
Some accounts credit Malcolm Canmore, an 11th-century Scottish king, for starting the first Highland Games, which consisted of a single hill race up a mountain. But these hardly compare to the great variety of athletics that the Celts of Scotia, like the Greeks at Olympia, enjoyed for generations.
Ancient traditions cite contests in footraces, leaping, vaulting, wrestling, lifting heavy weights and putting stones begun in pre-Christian times.
Places in both Eire and modern-day Northern Ireland have been cited for hosting these games, but the most important ones were at Teltown in County Meath, at Emain Macha near Armagh in Ulster and at Carmain in Leinster.
The first of these at Teltown were funeral games that honored the dead foster mother of a half-mortal, half-deity called Lugh, the Celtic God of Light. From Lugh and from nasa, meaning “games,” comes Lughnasa, the modern Gaelic word for August, still the traditional month for Highland Games in Scotland. (The Grandfather Mountain Highland Games were held in August until 1958, when the date was changed to the second full weekend in July.)
Celtic peoples known as the Scotti, now called Highland Scots, crossed the North Channel of the Irish Sea in the fourth and fifth centuries. They settled on the coast of Argyll. Soon they were staging games of foot racing, horse racing and wrestling every St. Michael’s Day, Sept. 29. The event was known as the Oda, or Odaigh, believed to be a Norse word taken into Gaelic.
The origins of many events seen today at the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games can be traced back to these funeral games and the Odas, religious fairs, military musters and cattle fairs.
Such fairs crossed the Atlantic. In pre-Revolutionary North Carolina, athletics and piping were enjoyed by Highland colonists at two famous cattle fairs: Laurel Hill (present-day Scotland County) and modern-day Ellerbe (Richmond County).
The Grandfather Highland Games were begun in 1956 by the late Agnes MacRae Morton of Linville and Wilmington, N.C., and Donald F. MacDonald, formerly of Charlotte, now of Edinburgh, Scotland. Because MacDonald modeled the games after the Royal Braemar Gathering, which he attended in 1954, Grandfather is often referred to as “America’s Braemar.”
Although small by today’s standards, the first games were an instant success and generated a great deal of interest. In later years other Highland Games sprang up in Pennsylvania, Georgia, South Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Florida and Tennessee, among others.
The Grandfather Games were the first in America to stage “Tossing the Sheaf.” And perhaps the most authentically Highland event takes place on Saturdays and Sundays inside the Gaidhlig Ceilidh Tent, where you can hear Gaelic speech and music.
Across the main entrance to the Grandfather Games is a banner proclaiming in Gaelic “Failte gu Beinn Seanair” (Welcome to Grandfather Mountain) — a nod to the fact that North Carolina descendants of the Highland immigrants spoke the Gaelic language up to the First World War.
The Grandfather Games is a charitable organization. Proceeds are used to support the games and for a scholarship fund for local students.
