Scottish Highland Gathering and Games in Pleasanton, CA

Almost a year ago we featured the Williamsburg Scottish Festival near Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. It’s a fantastically fun few days for anyone in to culture, competition and big personalities, and who isn’t? But, if you live in Northern California, I can admit, Virginia is way way over there. Like, way.

Fortunately for you, highland games festivals are popular from coast to coast, and you might be within a couple hours’ drive of the Caledonian Club Scottish Highland Gathering and Games hosted at Pleasanton Fairgrounds in Pleasanton, California. If you can scrounge up that old kilt from college and make the drive, you won’t want to miss this sensational Labor Day event.

As the largest Scottish games festival on the West Coast, you can bet the Scottish Highland Gathering and Games delivers all the classics and a fair bit more. Like most such games, the festival brings together traditional and non-traditional pipe music, dancing, drum corps, kilts, rugby and soccer, sheep herding, festival fair, and most importantly, the heavy games.

The heavy games or heavy events are the soul of any good Scottish festival. The strongest men (and women) in the region put their inner-William Wallace to the test in a number of unusual strength competitions – none more unusual than the caber toss. In this game, competitors hoist a 19-foot length of tapered tree trunk tall-wise, and then attempt a precision forward lob. The measure of success is not the distance of the throw, but how the caber acts when it lands. The perfect throw will land spin at least one in the air, land on the narrow end and fall forward, or twelve o’clock from the player. A fall in any other direction is less than perfect.

Other traditional highland games include Putting the Stone, basically a shot put competition but with a heavier stone (of course), a game throwing a weight for height or distance, and finally the famous hammer throw, a form of the Olympic event using a cane handle instead of the more common wire.

If seeing how far dudes and dude-ettes can chuck a thing, the Scottish Highland Gathering and Games still has plenty to get excited about. The packed fairgrounds include a grandstand show with pipe bands and even the U.S. Marine band from San Diego. There is a Scottish dancing competition as well as an Irish step dancing stage show for the first time ever. Enjoy a little Scottish history by watching a costumed “historical” interpretation. You can even see a demonstration on falconry.

Plus lots, lots more. The Caledonian Club Scottish Highland Gathering and Games is simply a day of unexpected and often fascinating fun that we can’t recommend highly enough. This year’s festival will be held Labor Day weekend, September 4-5, 2010, at Pleasanton Fairgrounds in Pleasanton, California. Visit the website for ticketing information.

Have fun at the Scottish Highland Gathering and Games!

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