The first Highland Society was founded in 1787 by Scotsmen resident in London; their initial activities seem to have emerged from a lobby to repeal the ban on Highland dress and culture, achieved in 1782. The Society was partly aimed at social improvement, in an Enlightenment-Patriotic spirit (schools, fisheries, and a public infirmary established in Inverness in 1807), partly aimed at cultural preservation (“Preserving the Martial Spirit, Language, Dress, Music, and antiquities of the Ancient Caledonians; Rescuing from oblivion the valuable remains of Celtic Literature”). This last aim was served by the publication, in 1828, of a Gaelic dictionary, Dictionarium Scoto-Celticum, dedicated to King George IV.
Similar Highland Societies sprang up over the decades around 1800, many of them displaying the same mix of social (or agricultral) improvement and a cultivation of culture. (The Highland Society of Aberdeen declared that its first object was “to promote the general use of the ancient Highland dress”.) In the 1790s, piping competitions were held, some of these at festive events under the auspices of a local Highland Society. (These may have inspired the harping competitions that began to be held in the same decade in Ireland.) Medals for piping were awarded by the London society in 1812 and 1815. At Inverness, piping displays and competitions in 1822 became part of a sociable event begun in 1798 and known as the “Northern Meeting”, forerunner of what are now the Inverness Highland Games. The village of St Fillans, on Loch Earn, had around 1819 established its Highland Society, which held piping competitions as well as sporting events which were evidently meant to cultivate or display the nation’s “martial spirit”.
These events crystallized and gathered momentum during the most important national festival of the century: the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822. Walter Scott was entrusted with the management of what was a precarious occasion: the monarch had been losing popularity since his halcyon days as Prince Regent, and the most recent engagement of the Hanover dynasty with its Scottish realm had been the brutal suppression of the 1745 rebellion that aimed to oust them. Scott drew on all the resources of his erudition, cultural traditionalism, and personal prestige to make the event a reconciliation between the monarchy and Scottish cultural traditions, involving traditionalist clan chiefs with their retinue, pipers, tartan, and traditional dress. The Highland Societies were instrumental in helping to mobilize and focus the pageantry. In turn, the pageantry helped to give a new festive-cultural focus to their activities. Another impetus was given around 1840, when the Braemar Gathering gained the patronage of Queen Victoria, located as it was near her castle at Balmoral.
As the Highland games gained popularity from the mid-century on, their repertoire consolidated. It involved piping (and, later in the century, displays of Highland dancing), and those rural or pastoral feats of strength and prowess that also feature in similar sportive festivals in Switzerland and the Basque Country: wrestling, running, and the lifting or throwing of heavy objects. In the process, some “traditional” sports were regularized or invented which since have become icons of Scottish identity, such as caber tossing. (The most assiduous “invention of tradition” regarded the Games themselves, which later Victorian and Edwardian texts invariably derived from medieval, immemorially established clan-based practices, glossing over their character as folkloristic displays for tourist audiences.) The Highland dress code was also de rigueur by this time. In 1889, the Highland games were canonized into a national icon to the extent that “Highlands” display was showcased at the Paris World Fair of that year.
As that event indicates, the Highland Games were not limited to the Highlands, but spread worldwide (like Burns Night), across the Empire’s garrison-places of the Highland Regiments, and in localities in the New World with a Scottish diaspora community.
A musical and literary cultural festival emerged in the 1890s: the Mòd. Its twin roots were the choral festivals then widely popular across the United Kingdom, and the cultural nationalism as pursued by the revivalist Comunn Gàidhealach (“Gaelic association”). The sparking event was a Gaelic-repertoired performance given by a Glasgow church choir in Oban in 1891, inspiring the first Mòd (“moot, meeting”) festival held in 1892, with An Comunn Gàidhealach, established in the same year, as the organizing body. The model was that of the Welsh eisteddfod, and it was soon followed in Ireland by the establishment of the Gaelic League in 1893 with its oireachtas festival (which likewise invoked the example of the eisteddfod) – the reticulation forming the first manifestation of a Pan-Celticist movement reaching beyond the established Breton-Welsh axis. Both An Comunn Gàidhealach and the Mòd (now called the Royal National Mòd) are still active, and local Mòds have proliferated.
