Braemar Gathering

A day of games

The Gathering is held at the Princess Royal and Duke of Fife Memorial Park, in the Cairngorms National Park. Competitions run all day. The heavy events are the core of any Highland games: throwing the hammer, putting the stone and tossing the caber, with the more recent weight for distance and weight over the bar. More than a hundred dancers from the UK and beyond compete in Highland dancing for the Silver Medal, to the sound of the Highland bagpipes, and solo pipers play from 9:30 in the morning. There are sprints, middle-distance races and jumps, a hill race that draws runners from across Europe and the armed forces, and tug of war and medley relay contests between military teams.

At 11:30 the massed pipe bands parade from the Invercauld Arms Hotel through the village to the park, and they play together as massed bands at noon and again in the afternoon.

A royal occasion

There have been gatherings of some kind at Braemar, the organisers say, since the time of King Malcolm Canmore more than nine hundred years ago. The modern Gathering has been run in its present form since 1832 by the Braemar Highland Society, founded in 1815 as the Braemar Wright Society and granted royal status by Queen Victoria in 1866. Victoria attended in 1848, and since then the reigning monarch and members of the royal family have come regularly. The monarch is the patron of the society and Chieftain of the Gathering. Its foot races, held regularly since 1832, are the oldest in the world.