Tree Throwing and Violent Hugging - Here Come the Highlanders.

There are cultures on this wide world of ours so alien to us as to seem nearly extraterrestrial. There are cultures that are so familiar that we never doubt our common ancestry. Then there are those cultures so deceptively familiar that they belie their absolute strangeness. As an example, read this Scottish Travel Guide.

The Scottish – friendly, wholesome, down-to-earth folks responsible for redheads, fine whisky and some of the most bizarre sports ever conceived. Take, for instance, Cumberland Style Wrestling. Cumberland Style is really just violent hugging. Forget finesse, forget complex moves – if your hands become unlocked from behind your opponent, you lose. You win if they fall backwards. This was most likely invented by drunks traveling home when they realized they needed to prop one another up, and the fellow who was on top when they tumbled into the bog was the one who would be less apt to drown.

Then there’s the king daddy of all strange European sports. As odd as curling (or, as I call it, ’synchronized sweeping’) is, the Caber Toss. While the dwarf toss seems somewhat logical – who doesn’t want to throw things smaller than them? – the Caber Toss is the epitome of counter-intuitive activity. Caber Tossing is throwing trees. Yes, trees.

Well, nowadays, the Caber is more often than not a telephone poll, but that’s no less impressive. I’ve no idea how the Caber Toss was invented but it seems that all Scottish sports were created by enormous people and promoted by greedy chiropractors. The Caber is held any way you want, you run as long as you want – or can run, while holding a freaking telephone poll – and tossed end over end. You get three tries, providing you survive the first two, and the best of three counts. The Caber has to turn end over end for the toss to count, and you thought it was just going to be a piece of cake.

If there are any Scots reading this, please educate me as to the origin of this sport. I mean, I’m no drooping violet but it’s never occurred to me to attempt to throw a tree end over end. If I did happen to be strolling home one day and thought, “Hey, Eli, why don’t we go ahead and try to throw one of these fine Maples,” I would only consider doing so javelin style, in the interest of Aerodynamics.

Other Scottish sports have found their way into the mainstream, or perhaps vice versa, and are here to stay. Putting the Stone is essentially a shot put, Throwing the Hammer is the Olympic style hammer toss but others are a bit … fringe. Tossing a 56lb weight for height, not distance, will likely never catch on. And, rounding out the list of things the Scots love to toss is the… Haggis. If you want to know why that’s odd, you really need to Google “Haggis.”

Have your own Scottish Dream and click here for a tour with CIE.

For more information on the highland games:
http://www.nhscot.org/ - highland games new hampshire
http://www.gmhg.org/ - Highland games north carolina
http://www.highlandgames.net/ - an all around great resource