Scottish for the Day

A Scottish terrier, wearing a plaid coat and a tam o'shanter, wasn't the first sign that we weren't in Unionville anymore: We spent Saturday in Fair Hill, Md., at the Colonial Highland Gathering (the Scottish Games, for short), where we were surrounded by kilts, Celtic tattoos and pipers from near and far.
In the vendors' area, you could buy clothing, jewelry, plaques, swords and shields emblazoned with your clan's tartan or emblem. Food vendors were offering Scottish meat pies, Scotch eggs, sausage rolls, real British chips, turkey legs and massive neon-colored snow-cones (I'm not sure how authentic those were).

Our first stop was the caber tossing competition, in which muscular men and women were required to lift the equivalent of a telephone pole (a top-heavy telephone pole to boot) and hurl it end-over-end, a nearly impossible feat. In a later competition, they had to toss a 56-pound weight over a horizontal pole 15 feet up. Backward. These were some of the least ergonomic moves I've ever seen. Some of the spectators were real fans: I heard one boy rattling off statistics about one of the burly competitors as if he were an American football celebrity.

As we walked through the fairgrounds, we started hearing the sound of bagpipe bands. The pipers and drummers took the competition quite seriously, with their scores carefully marked at each competition site. I enjoyed watching the drummers doing these cool little flourishes with their drumsticks between beats. One fellow was even practicing on a fence rail.
At the far end of the fairgrounds we saw a sheepdog demonstration, in which a very well trained Border Collie, Jip, herded five sheep around an enclosure, through a chute and into a pen. Her focus, efficiency and concentration were remarkable. Barely audible voice commands were all her master needed to get her to accomplish her tasks.

I think my favorite part of the day was people-watching. Most of the visitors wore some kind of plaid, either a kilt or T-shirt or dress or scarf. We saw two elderly nuns, in traditional brown habits, riding on a golf cart. Many of the girls and women were wearing headbands, either flowers or sparkly foil. One friend we ran into was wearing a kilt that he admitted wasn't quite his clan's, but close; leather gauntlets; a loose white shirt; and a black leather sporran (belt pouch) of distinctly non-Scottish origin: he told us he bought it years ago at Ozzfest.
There was a Highland dancing competition that unfortunately we didn't get to see. We only saw the girls practicing on little portable dance floors and heard the winners' names being announced for dances like "the reel" and "the Highland fling." We also wanted to see the "Entrance of the Haggis and Robert Burns' Address to the Haggis" (surely a highlight of the day) but there was so much going on that we missed it, too.
I was astonished at how many people attended. As we were leaving, we saw horse vans on Telegraph Road leaving the Fair Hill Training Center and the drivers looked surprised at all the costumed people crossing the road. Actually, there was such a crowd that the Border Collie would've come in handy.