Camanachd!

Shinty – or camanachd as it was traditionally known in the Gaelic-speaking Highlands – was introduced to the north-west of Scotland 1,500 years ago from the north-east of Ireland. By the Middle Ages it had become the village sport from Gairloch to Galashiels and the deeds of its great players were the stuff of folklore and legend.

Shinty was taken by Scots all over the world. Twenty-four camain were standard issue to battalions of the Lovat Scouts during the Boer War and Highland emigrants to Canada saw the game evolve into the national sport of ice hockey. At home, the existence of shinty was frequently threatened, by royal edicts against popular ‘uncontrollable’ games, by the Sabbatarianism which outlawed the playing of sports on the day of rest, and by the rapid erosion of the old Highland way of life after the Jacobite swan-song of 1745.

In this revised and updated edition of his much-acclaimed book, Roger Hutchinson shows how the game stubbornly survived in Highland glens, on island shores and in public parks as far afield as Wimbledon and Edinburgh, until a series of memorable exhibition matches led in 1893 to the foundation of the Camanachd Association, a constitutional body which has taken shinty into the age of sponsorship, national press attention and TV coverage.

Roger Hutchinson is an award-winning author and journalist who has written for BBC Radio, The Scotsman, The Guardian, The Herald and The Literary Review. He joined the West Highland Free Press in 1977 and is still attached to it as editorialist and columnist. He has four times been the Camanachd Association’s Shinty Writer of the Year, three times the Highlands and Islands Sportswriter of the year, and in 1996 he was elected British Weekly Sportswriter of the Year.