'He was said to have inspired the burly hunk on the Scott’s Porage Oats box': The history of the Highland Games

Highland folklore relates that, upon attending the Braemar Gathering in Aberdeenshire, Queen Victoria was disconsolate to discover that her sporting favourite, Donald Dinnie of Balnacraig, had already taken his turn in the stone-throwing competition, the event with which Braemar was most closely associated.

Hurriedly, an official was sent to ask the strapping Scot if he wouldn’t mind putting the 28lb stone again, for the benefit of the Queen Empress. ‘Aye,’ Dinnie replied. ‘For £2 and not a penny less.’ He got his money. That the Widow of Windsor and the stonemason’s son from Aberdeenshire should be linked in this likely apocryphal tale is apt, for the mismatched pair had done much to make the Highland Games — which had been outlawed for more than 30 years under the 1746 Act of Proscription — into something not only respectable, but fashionable, too.

Queen Victoria had been an enthusiast for Highland sports since attending an early iteration of the Games in 1848 (an event for which she would become patron in 1867). Braemar was convenient for Balmoral Castle and Her Majesty would remain an enthusiastic attendee at the gatherings for more than 50 years. Dinnie, meanwhile, lays claim to being the UK’s first global sporting superstar. Brilliant not only at putting the stone, but also tossing the caber and throwing the hammer, the great Deesider’s world tours ensured that he was recognisable to sports fans from New Zealand to Canada and from San Francisco to Cape Town.

In the late 19th century, the remarkable Scot was as much an international paragon of our island’s athletic prowess as Sir Roger Bannister and Sebastian Coe would later become. Although running, jumping, dancing and the music of bagpipes, fiddles and Gaelic harps play their part in the Highland Games, much as they did in the ancient Olympics, the cornerstone of the games are the ‘heavy events’ at which Dinnie excelled.

As their collective name suggests, these involve throwing mighty objects: hammer, stone, weight or caber. The heavy events have a power, grandeur and simplicity that echo the landscape in which they were created and, although there are subtleties to them that please the expert eye, even those watching for the first time can understand them.

There are no complex offside laws, bewildering umpiring decisions or video assistant referee (VAR) reviews. With a history dating back to the reign of Malcolm III (1058–93), the heavy events are as wreathed in legend as the local glens and lochs and they have created many heroes.

Dinnie was the first of them — a wonder of the Victorian Age to compare to Stephenson’s Rocket. Born in 1837, the Scot could sprint, hurdle, jump (long and high, possibly both at the same time) and pole-vault, as well as toss the caber, putt the stone and throw the hammer. He was Highland Games Champion for 21 straight years, from 1856 to 1876. The man from Balnacraig stood about 6ft tall with 15in biceps, a 48in chest and a bristling moustache. ‘He carried his sixteen stone of bone, flesh and muscle with an ease, grace and elasticity of motion rarely if indeed ever seen in a man of his proportions… his dark, finely moulded features revealed intellectualism of the highest order… his flashing penetrating eyes a sharp native wit,’ gushed the correspondent of The North Star.

He also had a swagger that bordered on arrogance. Often, he was so confident of victory he would toss the caber without bothering to take off his jacket. On other occasions, he issued a challenge to beat any other man’s two throws with one of his own. Bets and challenges added to his prize winnings (Highland Games competitors were and would remain professionals) and it’s said that, during his 50-year career, he won more than 11,000 events.

His global tours earned him about £25,000 (the equivalent of about £2 million today). Sadly, as many great sports-people did, he spent merrily and invested unwisely. Shortly before his death in 1916, he was reported to be ‘eking out a bare existence in Croydon’ — a cruel fate for any man.

The tartan-clad gladiators who followed in Dinnie’s considerable shadow might not have enjoyed the same global celebrity, but they were no less colourful. There was the ‘Highland Adonis’, who would go on to have an ill-fated assignation with a Hollywood film star. This was dark-haired Jay Scott, who stood 6ft 2in in his stocking feet and had powerful muscles developed from rowing himself to school across Loch Lomond from the family farm on Inchmurrin Island.

Scott was a superb all-round athlete who excelled not only at the heavy events, but also at running and jumping. Handsome and charismatic, during his 1950s heyday, the rugged farmer was as unstoppable as a runaway train. At the games in Tobermory on the Hebridean island of Mull, he once carried off first prize in all the heavy events, as well as the 100yd and 200yd, the triple jump, long jump, high jump and pole vault.

Scott was handed the award for best athlete at the Aboyne Games seven times on the trot and, if his performances often seemed to be accompanied by the sound of music, that was likely the vibrating heartstrings of watching ladies. Little wonder he was said to have inspired the burly hunk on the Scott’s Porage Oats box (porage, incidentally is an amalgam of porridge and potage that was adopted by the makers in 1914).

The great athlete married the glamorous English actress and singer Fay Lenore after the couple’s eyes locked at the Braemar Games, but she had competition. At the peak of his fame, her husband toured the US and Canada, where his powerful physique and matinée-idol looks attracted the attention of Jayne Mansfield, a film star of such improbable proportions she made Sophia Loren look like Twiggy.

A romantic tryst on Mansfield’s heart-shaped bed seemed set, but, when the Scotsman tried to shoo the blonde bombshell’s yapping chihuahuas from the boudoir, she took umbrage. Her minders were summoned, lifted the thwarted paramour into the air, carried him down the stairs and dumped him in the swimming pool.

In the days when athletics in Britain was strictly amateur, the prize money on offer at the Highland Games made them very attractive to strong men from south of the border, too. Cambridgeshire policeman Geoff Capes was a double European and Commonwealth shot-putt champion and was pretty invincible during the 1980s Highland Games heavy events. Bearded and fearsome, he stood at 6ft 6in and was built like an oak tree. He might have come from the flat country of the English Fens and bred budgerigars as a hobby, but, in kilt and vest, he was every US film producer’s ideal of a Highland chieftain.

Capes followed a trail blazed by another shot putter 20 years earlier. Arthur Rowe was born in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and worked in a coal mine, training for athletics behind his local pub using weights made from the wheels of pit wagons. He was British champion five times and also won golds at the Commonwealth and European Championships in the 1950s. However, things went sour for Rowe at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Tipped to win a medal, he suffered a terrible upset stomach, lost close to 10lb in weight and failed to qualify for the final. Disillusioned and broke, he quit the rarefied world of amateur athletics and headed for the Highlands, where the best performers were paid in cash.

The gruff Yorkshireman made his debut at the Braemar Games in 1962 wearing a borrowed kilt and promptly broke the all-time record for putting the stone. The offers and money soon flowed in. At his peak in the mid 1960s, the former pitman was being paid £30 appearance fees per event — a substantial sum in the days when an experienced office worker might take home £15 a week.

The burly Yorkshireman struck up a fierce yet amiable rivalry with ‘Big’ Bill Anderson, a mighty slab of a fellow from Bucksburn, Aberdeenshire, who trained on a diet of mince and tatties, worked out in his garage during the winter months lifting tractor tyres and was the first competitor in history to throw the heavy hammer more than 150ft. The mismatched pair pushed each other to greater and greater performances and became firm friends in the process. In one celebrated incident on a rainy day at Lochearnhead, the two giants lifted up a car that had got stuck in the mud ‘as easily as if they were popping a cork from a bottle’. It was a sight that would surely have amused even Queen Victoria.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.