New Scotland, New Stones - Gaelic Strength Culture Across The Atlantic

Gaelic Strength Culture Across The Atlantic

Relevant geography update if you're like me and relatively unfamiliar with Canada other than that Toronto is in the east and Vancouver in the west. Nova Scotia is a province (equivalent of county if you're also from the U.K) and covers all the yellow bits in the image from Wikipedia. Cape Breton is part of that, and is the bit on the upper right corner of the image - shaped a bit like a leaf split in two.

Right now I had planned to be finishing off the final installment on Skye, as my trip to the Misty Isle looms. I was researching further for Clach Mhor Na Saothraich, and came across a website called "Cape Breton's Magazine" and a scanned image from page 26 of "D.N. MacLennan's History of Grand River", which seems to be an ongoing (I think? by that I mean, was ongoing too) published article in a newspaper. The date on the page suggests the article is from 1977.   Grand River is a town on the south side of Cape Breton. Below is the image. Original source here. This sparked a bit of a flurry of diverted excitement so I figured the best way to get it out of my system was to indulge a little bit of time, enough to sate my appetite for now. 

The relevant paragraph is on the right column, starting with "Among". Bessie MacAskill, an extra strong woman.

Nova Scotia's first permanent European settlers (aside from a small short lasting Portuguese colony earlier in history) were from Scotland, with many Scots leaving their homeland as a result of the Highland Clearances, to lands far away such as Canada, America and Australia. Peter Martin once wrote on an IronMind forum post (I feel like I say this a lot...) that undoubtedly they would have carried over elements of their cultures and traditions (as we see with events like Highland games' across the world), and one's best bet to find evidence of any stone lifting they may have embarked on in new lands would have been with coffin roads. In the first half of his "Of Twixt the Stone and Turf" there's a story included of a Highlander living in America who had a testing stone on his lands to determine if prospective workers were strong enough. 

What particularly caught my interest in the above image is not only the feat, and subsequent remembrance of the feat by her name being imparted onto the stone - that had clearly been lifted before by some men, was her surname - MacAskill. MacAskill is a surname that is twinned with Cape Breton and strength, for it is the surname of Angus MacAskill, also referred to as the "Cape Breton Giant". Born in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, his family moved to Cape Breton when he was six, in 1831. At adulthood he stood at 7'7" tall, 193kg and had a chest measurement of 80inches. What sounds even more absurd is the length of his palms - listed at 12 inches, a whole foot - that's a bloody shovel attached to a wrist, not a hand!  As tall as he was in stature, as are the feats of his strength - shouldering and carrying an anchor weighing 2700lbs, setting huge masts onto boats and many more. Whilst our giant would not have been lifting stones at age six in his homeland, as he only grew far larger than his peers in early adolescence, given his feats of strength and aptitude for it, I feel it isn't a stretch to imagine he lifted a stone or two on Cape Breton. 

So here we fast forward a hundred or so years to the article, with another MacAskill, in all likelihood related given the similar surname, small timeframe and restricted geographical location. Like the Giant MacAskill before her, she was clearly blessed with prodigious strength and earnt her place in the gestalt consciousness of her local community with this feat. 

Whilst Bessie's stone is now according to the author, long lost (and for the sake of trying, I've found naught about it anywhere else online), this snippet of Gaelic stone culture across the Atlantic from me had my mind racing, as I'm sure many other stone-crazies can appreciate the feeling. Whether it be a new stone or your first visit to a stone, there's the rush of adrenaline and excitement that courses through the body, as you contemplate, either mentally with your imagination or physically as your fingers try find purchase on it's cold surface, lifting the stone as many have before you. 

Armed with my new keywords of the day and a burning desire to at least find something about stone lifting and Canada, off I went down the rabbit hole. 

"Going Strong - The Role of Physical Strength among the Scots of Eastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton" was what I found, and is an amazing read. A long one, but a great one. I've tried to surmise it a few times in writing now and keep coming back to the fact I don't feel clever enough to do it justice. It's not just about stones (as the title probably gives away), but the more overarching cultural aspects that our funny little hobby of stone lifting was born under. It's certainly packed full of feats of strength of all kinds too.  If you don't fancy the read (you really should), then I'll pick out some of the stone related stories here for you.

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 The [5] addendum goes as follows "Murdock MacNeil referred to this stone in his interview on June 28, 2005. He recalled that it was situated near the local school, weighed 300 pounds (136 kg), and had been moved by Iagan Dhòmhnaill Mhòir." Below is the Fig.1 image of the Big Beach stone. 

Three stones are described there, the Gairloch lifting stone moved to Pictou, a lifting stone at the(?) crossroads of Benacadie and the Big Beach stone weighing in at 136kg, situated near a local school. Add to that Bessie's stone and we've got knowledge of four lifting stones from the area. I'm not quite sure on the wording of the Big Beach stone and it's location - the article states it survives to this day and is looked after by a property owner, but the interviewee says it was situated near a school. Are these mutually exclusive, or was the school site it's first location and now it resides somewhere else? These all sound like relatively promising prospects for surviving lifting stones, and from the number of interviews the writers conducted (for a 2016 publishing) the culture still lives on in the memory of certain local peoples. 

Lastly, here's a fun stone story from the article that might give fathers reading this a good idea - at least an excuse to tell the better half why you need your own personal lifting stone sitting in the front garden! How heavy would your "suitor stone" be? 

Is anyone researching or looking into this area for stones currently? I'm emotionally tied to a few areas of Scotland currently and then have some other places and ideas in mind to look at - not to mention it's a long way to go to Canada compared to European countries for me! (Sadly I visited Canada a few months ago and didn't have this knowledge back then).