The Highland Games: Cabers, Stones, and the Heavy Events

Sat, 01 Aug 2015 15:34:00 +0000

A caber is not thrown for distance. That’s the detail that trips up every first-time spectator, and I got it wrong myself the first time a Scottish friend explained it to me over a beer at a festival bar. You watch a man built like a shipping container heft a twenty-foot pine pole upright, cradle the narrow end in laced hands, sprint three strides, and launch the thing skyward — and your instinct is to look for how far it flew. Distance is not the point. The point is the flip. A perfect toss sees the caber turn end over end in the air and land dead straight ahead of the thrower, the far end striking the ground first and the near end following through to point back at the man who threw it, like a compass needle finding true north. Judges call that the twelve o’clock position. Everything else — nine o’clock, ten-thirty, a caber that simply topples sideways without turning at all — is a lesser toss, however far it travelled. It is a test of technique dressed up as a test of brute force, and that gap between what it looks like and what it actually is has been drawing crowds in Scotland for close to two centuries.

Heavy Events - vo.rs

The Highland Games: Cabers, Stones, and the Heavy Events