Where to discover... Shinty

Shinty is an ancient sport played almost exclusively in Scotland, but it's not for the faint-hearted. Dominic Roskrow reports.

As sports go, shinty is at the hairy, muscley end of the spectrum.

When it's played at its most frenetic and full-blooded, it requires guts, strength and skill in equal measure. It is awesome in the truest sense of the word, a sport as rough and rugged as the Highland landscape that originally produced it. A shinty ball may travel at 100 miles an hour and control of it requires the deftest of touches and the sharpest of reactions.

But there is another side to the sport. In recent years it has grown from its traditional base and captured the imagination of a crosssection of people, and increasingly the sport is being played by women, children and teenagers. It has spread over Scotland's borders, too, with clubs in England, Canada and America.

While shinty has developed as a uniquely Scottish sport, its origins are almost certainly based in other games, most notably hurling in Ireland. It is very likely that sports involving hitting a ball with a curved stick were played in a number of different places around the world. There is evidence that such a game was being played in Athens in the fifth century BC, and that a sport called camanachd was being played in sixth, seventh and eighth centuries.

It is likely that shinty was linked to training warriors, regarded as the perfect way to develop the skills that would be needed in battle and to learn skills in team-working and positive attitudes and behaviours that would serve people well in their lives. The present-day sport stil...

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• By : Dominic Roskrow
• In : Sport
• Issue : 46
• Page : 35
• Words : 1,007