Weird and wonderful Scottish world champions

Jordan Gray with his prize for climbing the greasy pole. Picture: Donald MacLeod

From climbing poles to skimming stones, you have to be ‘a wee bitty crazy’ to become a local hero

Like Calvary it rises from the moor, a steep green hill with a tall wooden pole driven deep into the summit. The pole is smeared thick with stinking grey-brown grease and on the top, nailed fast some 35 feet up, is a huge joint of ham bound in black bin bags. This, for generations, has been a proving ground for Irvine’s young men. Can they climb the greasy pole and fetch down the meat? Will they end the day as local heroes or has-beens? “C’moan lads!”

“Gaun, big man!”

“Get a grip! Push his fit up!”

Irvine locals attempt to climb the greasy pole and claim the ham at the top. Picture: Donald MacLeod

For hours the crowd has been gathering. Now, at about half-two in the afternoon, there is a great ring of people round the pole. This is the Saturday of Marymass, an annual festival which has taken place in Irvine since the 12th century. It is quite a pageant. Earlier, various big cheeses and cheesesses, high heidyins and heidyangs had processed through the town on horseback, many in medieval costume. Now, though, all eyes are on the greasy pole – a tradition said to go back 100 years or more.

“You have to be a wee bitty crazy to do it,” says Siobhan Turner, 24, whose brother Thomas is, as she speaks, grimacing in pain, having fallen from the pole and cut his foot. “It’s hard to watch your family up there.”

All over Scotland there are events like this; demonstrating feats of strength and skill barely known and scarcely reported outwith the area in which they take place, yet which afford the victor celebrity and bragging rights within his or her own patch. Each village has its Usain Bolt, each wee town its Jessica Ennis-Hill. And it is surely only right that in 2013, between the Olympics and Commonwealth Games, we sing the names of these unsung champions.

“C’moan, Kirk! C’moan, Jordan!”

“Legs straight! Keep solid! Get the knee up, young yin!”

This is how you climb a greasy pole: find the biggest, hardest guy you can, stick him at the bottom with his arms wrapped tight round it, and stack four others on top of him, the lightest at the top. You need a monster and a monkey and three strong men in between.

Today, there are ten or so taking part. Some are from the rugby club. Others seem to be more of a gang. The Irvine Toi is mentioned, and a bottle of Buckie passes from hand to greasy hand, lubricating drouthy throats. The crowd roars encouragement each time a man climbs on another’s shoulders, and abuse each time they fall heavily on to the filthy foam mattresses at the foot of the pole. The grannies are the worst. Before long, all the climbers are slick with muck, tops off, jogging bottoms ripped and stained, tattoos of red hands and Rangers crests lost beneath the dirt.

“Sixteen year I was up there,” says Rab Affleck, a big man in the crowd. “Sixteen year on the trot we won.”

Rab, a former boxer turned actor, is “aulder than God” now, but you still would not mess with him. He and four of his pals, two of whom – Davey Frew and Yakky Hanvey – are also here today, were the greatest team of climbers Irvine has ever seen, the Galácticos of the greasy pole, dominating the competition throughout the 1970s and for half of the decade that followed. Rab was the bottom man, holding 50-odd stone of flesh and bone steady on his shoulders. “What was it like?” he says, incredulous at the question. “It was f***in’ purgatory. And oh, it’s dangerous. I’ve seen folk get legs broken, ribs broken. I nearly broke my back. Trust me, it’s no’ easy.”

Why do it then? “We done it because our uncles done it, our faithers done it, our grandfaithers done it,” says Davey. “It’s Irvine tradition, you know.”

Also, the pay isn’t bad. Winning the ham gives you the right to parade it through the fair, through the streets and pubs of the town, collecting money as you go. You can earn hundreds. Cash and kudos and bacon sandwiches for a week.

Over the last few years, though, the ham has gone unclaimed. No one has been able to get it down, a fact that has Yakky aghast. “Never would have happened in oor day. And these young boys don’t look as if they’ve any chance. I can see me and Davey going up there to get it for them.”

In the end, however, there is no need for the Galácticos to come out of retirement. At eight minutes past four, 19-year-old Jordan Gray, with bloody fingers, frees the ham and then falls with it, spent, to the ground below. He is lifted in triumph and joy by big bare-chested Kirk Donaldson, the bottom man, who has returned to Irvine from Arran, drawn by the lure of the pole.

Kirk is 34 with a wife and young family and considers that he is getting too old for this sort of thing. “This is ma last time,” he says, eyes glinting through the grease. “Until next year.”

COAL CARRYING

One day each summer, at noon, the bunting-strung streets of Kelty ring with the thunder and pech of runners carrying on their straining backs sacks of coal. The Scottish Coal Race is run over a kilometre, uphill through the village, from the smiddy to the school, with women hefting 25 kilo bags and men double that.

The race has been going since 1994 and is regarded as a way of honouring the proud, sad industrial history of the Fife coalfield. Kelty once had 14 pits round about; now there are none. It is said that the miners would sometimes run home after their shift carrying a large piece of coal, called a “clug” or “raker”, for their own use. This story is a kind of prop on which the race rests.

Hazel Porter, a 33-year-old primary school teacher and mother of two from Dunfermline, is a star of the coal race. She has run it nine times and won it eight; she has missed it on just three occasions – twice because she was pregnant and once to attend a friend’s wedding. “I couldn’t believe he was getting married on Kelty gala day,” she laughs. “It was totally inconsiderate.”

She may owe some of her success to the advice of a local man, Tommy Hailstones, who suggested she sook a sweet on the start line. More likely, though, it is her fitness which has won through. Either way, it is important to her. “You’re at work. You’re a schoolteacher,” she says. “But somewhere in your back pocket is the fact that you’re a Scottish coal-carrying champion.”

Jimmy McIntyre from Kirkcaldy would dearly love to know that feeling. He wants to win. Everyone wants him to win, for the fairytale to come true. He is, you see, a coalman to trade, and spends his days humping 50 kilo sacks. He supplies the coal for the race and has run it five times, coming fifth, fourth, third, and second twice. He’s now 43, suffers from sciatica and worries that he might be past it. But he trains hard, on a quiet farm track known as the jaw-bane road, and feels deep inside that his day could come yet.

“I only want to win it once,” he says. “You never get remembered for being second, eh?

THE RED HOSE RACE

Scott McIntyre keeps his in the bottom drawer. Skye Dick has one of hers framed and mounted on the wall of her sister’s bakery; the other, she fears, is lost. What the winner of the Red Hose Race chooses to do with the scarlet socks they receive as a prize is entirely up to them, but in running the race they become part of a local custom dating back to the early 16th century.

“I run it because of the prize money,” says McIntyre, 26, an amateur boxer from the South Lanarkshire village of Carnwath. “It’s £100 to the winner. Easy money for three mile. I’m not quite sure what the tradition is, but there’s meant to be a bit of history behind it.”

Just a bit. The Red Hose Race is believed to be the oldest foot-race in Britain, if not the world. In 1508, King James IV granted the lands of Carnwath to a Lord Somerville on condition that “one pair of hose containing half an ell of English cloth” be given to the man who could run fastest from the village to a nearby crossroads. The point of this, it is thought, was to ensure speedy news of any invasion by English forces, and red socks were the insignia by which the messenger would be recognised.

The race is now held on the day of the local agricultural show. Anyone is welcome to take part, but only those from local parishes can receive the socks. Scott McIntyre has won five times. Skye Dick, who is 20 and studying civil engineering at Glasgow Uni, was victorious in 2012, becoming the first woman to win the red hose.

Angus Lockhart, the local laird, ensures the running of the Red Hose Race. This responsibility has lain with his family for centuries and with him for 30 years. He believes it will go on forever, though it is difficult to find anyone skilled in knitting socks. “It would be very sad if we curtailed it for any reason,” he says. “My son and his wife will be organising the race when I am pushing up the daisies.”

STONE SKIMMING

Dougie Isaacs, a 38-year-old van driver from Blairgowrie, is the greatest skimmer of stones Scotland has ever known. Five times he has been victorious at the world championships held each year on the tiny island of Easdale, more than any other person. Just last Sunday, he regained his crown from Ron Long, a retired fireman from Wales, in a thrilling four-way toss-off.

Isaacs, lugubrious and diffident, is at a loss to explain why he is so good at skimming stones. He shrugs the question off. “I’ve just got the bionic arm sort of thing, eh?”