Camanachd!: The Story of Shinty

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. Highland emigrants to Canada, whose descendants still play ‘shinny’ in winter on frozen lakes, saw their game evolve into the national sport of ice hockey. At home the existence of shinty was frequently threatened, by royal edicts against popular and ‘uncontrollable’ games, by the Sabbatarianism which followed upon the Reformation and which outlawed in many areas 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. But in this book, the first full history of shinty, the author shows how the game stubbornly survived in Highland glens and on island shores, in public parks as far afield as Wimbledon and Edinburgh, until a series of memorable exhibition matches, one hundred years ago, led to the foundation of the Camanachd Association, a constitutional body which has led shinty, preserving it against all the odds as one of the last great amateur sports into the age of sponsorship, national press attention and TV coverage. Camanachd! was originally published by Mains