Charles Bannerman: Looking forward to next weekend's 'true' Inverness Highland Games

YET another sure sign that we are reverting to pre-pandemic activity is the welcome return, after a two year enforced absence, of the Inverness Highland Games at the Bught a next Saturday.

The new organisers are High Life Highland alongside a committee of volunteers and I am really looking forward to seeing another symptom of normality as this institution celebrates its 75th anniversary.

I’m delighted that in recent weeks the new organisers have managed to resolve the strange myth that there’s some bicentenary link this year with a ghastly spectacle that took place at Dunain Croy, a couple of miles south of Inverness, in 1822.

Thankfully research, and I’ve been at it for some years, most recently alongside the staff of the Highland Archive Centre, has shown that there’s no historical basis whatsoever for any link. That’s even if you try to plug a big gap with the entirely separate Northern Meeting Games which ran from the mid 1830s until 1938. And even if there had been a link, what self-respecting celebration would want to be associated with something like the “True Highland Games” of 1822?This was the brainchild, or should we say brainstorm, of notorious Regency eccentric MacDonnell of Glengarry, with a programme including a cross country race for naked men and a disgusting competition involving tearing the legs off live cows which had been stunned by blows to the head from a sledgehammer.

Any notion of a connection here would be, at best, misguided.

In reality, Inverness’s own Highland Games were founded in 1947, amid a post-war leisure and cultural revival.

Highland Games are among a class of event which has to be careful not to over-egg the pudding. Following a famous visit to Edinburgh, also in 1822, by George IV dressed like something off the front of a shortbread tin, and then over-romanticised by Sir Walter Scott, Scottish culture had begun to have Brigadoon inflicted on it long before Hollywood got on the case. Games are therefore in danger at the best of times of being a parody of themselves, but this becomes much, much worse when Scottish culture is exported across the Atlantic and then sent back with extra layers of tackiness and vulgarity which the Americans are world leaders at inflicting on traditions far more ancient than their own. Typical symptoms tend to include laughably enormous feathers protruding from headgear and horribly psychedelic tartans in the worst possible taste.

I first experienced the Inverness Games in 1968, back in the days of Imperial measurement when I ran in the boys’ 100, 220 and 880 yards. I later went through roles as a coach, official, reporter for The Inverness Courier and even its athletics convener before returning as a veteran athlete.

Latterly, the event had begun to drift towards the American model rather than retain its own unique character of the Inverness Highland Games – an annual celebration belonging to the entire community, with tourists welcome to come and sample true Highland culture.

As such I am greatly looking forward to the 75th anniversary of this city’s summer celebration which will indeed assume its post-war status as a genuine, “true” Highland Games.

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