Bagpipes serenade brave hearts, strong men at Scottish Festival

It got a wee bit rowdy but that’s the way they like it at the Scottish Festival and Highland Games in Plantation.

The 35th annual event attracted more than 5,000 people to Heritage Park on Saturday for the food, athletic competitions, piping, drumming, fiddling, dancing, sheep herding, knobbly knees contest, Gaelic football and other kilt-clad cultural entertainment.

Scottish American Society treasurer and event coorganizer Nigel MacDonald said he felt challenged when doubters first told him no one would attend a Scottish celebration in cosmopolitan South Florida.

“Scots don’t tend to congregate. You don’t find Scottish neighborhoods in any city because if you get too many of them around they fight each other,” he said with a laugh. “But, they will come out of the woodwork for a party.” They did, and then some. Attendance has fluctuated between 2,000 and 8,000 over the years because the festival was forced to move to different parks around South Florida, MacDonald said.

“It was always something. Some places become unavailable,” he said. “We moved out of Crandon Park because of Hurricane Andrew and we moved out of Coral Springs because of Hurricane Wilma.”

Joe MacIntyre, 55, of Fort Lauderdale, keeps coming back for more.

“I just love it,” he said. “My wife and mother-inlaw took me to one down in Miami and I got hooked.”

Among the headlining attractions were the 2017 world champion City of Dunedin Pipe Band, the Seven Nations Celtic band, the McLanzon Lassies, and the top three world masters of the Scottish Masters Athletics International organization.

Mark Howe, 45, of Fort Myers, has been ranked No. 1 in the world four of the past five years for sports that include tossing the caber, the weight, and the sheaf, and throwing the stone and the hammer.

“I’ve been doing this since 1991,” he said. “I’ve seen guys into their 80s doing this, which I probably will do too if I can still walk.”

Fort Lauderdale resident Petrus Sundevall, 43, from Sweden, is ranked second in the world behind Howe.

“The first year I came it was because it looked fun, and then for the whiskey afterward and the camaraderie,” he said. “Then, I saw Mark Howe throwing hammer and I said, ‘Let me try to match that,’ and I came close so that’s why I’m No. 2.”

The lines were long for sausage rolls, fish and chips, meat pies, haggis and other Scottish staples, including beer. Crowds ringed the field where pipe and drum bands paraded, border collies herded sheep, and athletes competed.

The lone somber moment of the festival happened about midday. A prayer was said and a moment of silence was observed for the victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings.