Thousands celebrate Scottish heritage at Ligonier Highland Games

Wayne Bunch thinks he might have some Scottish heritage, but that’s not really what drew him to the Ligonier Highland Games on Saturday.

Bunch, 41, of Uniontown, was there for the chance to try out the unique sporting events.

Athletes donning kilts participated in Scottish games like the stone put — where participants throw heavy stones as far as they can — and the hammer toss, which requires people to twirl a steel-headed hammer over their heads and throw them over their shoulders.

Bunch had seen the games on television and then heard from a friend that the annual event at Idlewild would give him a chance to try it out.

“This morning was my first experience with it,” he said, watching participants take turns lobbing stones weighing between 22 and 28 pounds as far as they could. “Everybody’s super cool, very willing to teach. You just jump into it.”

Gordon Greer, on the other hand, has been participating in such events since 2009. Greer, 56, of Winchester, Va., travels to about six states for such competitions.

Saturday marked his last “warm-up game” before the 2025 Scottish Highland Games Masters World Championships in Mississippi next month.

Greer, who said he’s half Scottish, had just thrown a hefty stone about 32 feet in the Braemer stone competition.

“Strength doesn’t hurt,” he said, “but it’s all technique.”

Though the Highland Games tend to be male-dominated, Melinda Wamsley, 38, of Washington, was one of nine women participating.

“Anybody can throw on a kilt and come out here,” she said.

Wamsley said her family is half Polish and half Scottish — but they had never done anything quite like the Highland Games until she got involved three years ago. She has since made friends with other participants and collected heavy objects to use for practice at home.

“My neighbors probably think I’m crazy throwing things around the yard,” she joked.

But the Ligonier Highland Games event isn’t just about the heavy athletics.

Between 4,000 and 5,000 people gather for the event each year, Executive Director Richard Wonderly said. They eat Scottish food, listen to bagpipe music and learn about Scottish heritage.

Proceeds from the event fund a scholarship program.

“We want people to bring their families out and enjoy it and preserve the culture,” Wonderly said.

After the Jacobite Rising of 1745 — also known as the Scottish Revolution — the British banned kilts and other key signs of Scottish culture.

“They tried to extinguish Scottish culture,” Wonderly said.

But it survived. And Wonderly hopes the annual event will help keep it alive in new generations.

“The more we can teach, the better,” he said.

At a display showcasing Scottish history, Jon Baker showed off Scottish apparel and weapons that depicted key elements of Scottish military history from the Jacobite Rising to the modern day.

“It’s important we remember our history,” said Baker, 59, of Grove City.

And there are local connections, Jeffrey Graham pointed out.

Graham, 69, of Ligonier, said a Scottish unit was stationed at Fort Ligonier during Pontiac’s War, a Native American uprising in the 1760s.

Graham said he has been sharing Scottish history at the Ligonier Highland Games for more than three decades.

He even met his wife there, and they got married at the event two years later.

Bob Blachley connects with his Scottish heritage through music.

A bagpiper in the MacDonald Pipe Band of Pittsburgh, Blachley’s mother was from Scotland.

Blachley, 78, of Pittsburgh’s North Side, took up bagpipes in the 1980s. He showed off his traditional pipes, which are made from African Blackwood and ivory.

The instrument, he explained, plays only nine notes. He and others in the band memorize the music and tune their instruments to match their pitch.

“We just love doing it,” he said. “It’s great comradery.”

In another part of the park, bagpipes could be heard in the distance as Christopher and Susie McPherson sat at a tent dedicated to the McPherson clan.

“We just like to celebrate our clan, our family,” Christopher McPherson, 71, of Forest Hills, said.

Their family’s name was emblazoned on a banner that showed an orange cat and the family motto: “Touch not the cat but a glove.”

Susie McPherson said the phrase was meant to symbolize the clan was fierce.

She traced her husband’s Scottish ancestry to immigrants who traveled to America in the late 1700s.

“That’s as far back as I can trace them,” she said.