Strathmore Highland Games at Glamis Castle

We gave Grandad a true Scottish experience today at the Strathmore Highland Games at Glamis Castle. There was highland dancing – which Elizabeth participated in – caber tossing, stone throwing, running, cycling, tug-of-war, and various other heavy weight competitions including ones I’d never seen before like throwing beer barrels and carrying whopping great hunks of rock.

Elizabeth danced the best I’ve ever seen her do. She’s definitely getting better. But there was no trophy today unfortunately and she was a little bit disappointed but took it well. She’s the one dancing on stage and smiling in this next photo.

To give Grandad a true taste of Scotland the weather turned on us and it poured with rain. This next photo is of me trying to wring out the picnic rug which got soaked.

Grandad was wondering why people didn’t all get up and leave at this point but that’s because Australians are wusses. Scottish people aren’t afraid of a bit of weather and we knew the sun would come out again which of course it did. Here’s a photo of Glamis Castle just after the rain.

We all dried out, even the picnic rug!

Here’s the caber toss.

This is the beer barrel throw, the idea being to get the barrel over the bar without knocking it off.

And you can’t have a highland games without a pipe band.

Last time we came to Glamis Castle was November last year and we did a tour of the castle then. If you want to find out more about the history you can read my blog post about it: Glamis Castle. On that visit we picked up an acorn that was lying on the ground. It was autumn and there were acorns everywhere. We took it home and put it in a pot. It’s now a healthy sapling. I’m not sure where I’ll plant it as an oak tree will be too big for our garden but for now it can stay in the pot.