Shinty lets players swing at the ball in mid-air with either face of the stick
At first glance shinty looks like field hockey played in the Scottish Highlands. Then someone strikes a ball out of the air, using either side of a wedge-headed wooden stick, and another player barges an opponent shoulder to shoulder. The game shares its roots with Irish hurling, and a hybrid version lets the two nations compete every year.
The stick, called a caman after the Gaelic word for bent or crooked, is about 1.1 metres long, traditionally cut from any hooked piece of wood, once usually ash and now more often hickory. Its triangular head has two slanted faces and no blade, and it must fit through a ring two and a half inches across. The ball is a hard, leather-covered cork sphere about half the size of a tennis ball, with a raised seam like a baseball's. Teams field 12 players, or 10 in the women's game, over two halves of 45 minutes.
Rules keep the stickwork honest. Bringing your caman down on an opponent's stick is a foul called hacking. Only the goalkeeper may use hands, and even then only with an open palm, because catching is banned. Heading the ball counts as dangerous play, accidental or not. When the ball crosses the sideline, the restart is a shy: the taker tosses the ball straight overhead and strikes it with the shaft of the stick.
Nobody is sure where the English name comes from. One theory points to players' cries of shin ye; the historian Hugh Dan MacLennan proposes a Gaelic origin. In practice the game went by different names from glen to glen, and in the Lowlands it was known as hailes, cammock or knotty among others. Bandy, played on ice, shares its ancestry, and Gaelic calls it ice shinty; the Isle of Man has a cousin called cammag.
Like many sports, shinty was codified in the Victorian era, first by clubs of Highland migrants in Glasgow and London. A match between Glenurquhart and Strathglass in Inverness in 1887 drew thousands and pushed the game towards common rules, and the Camanachd Association held its first meeting in Kingussie in 1893. Substitutes arrived only in the 1960s.
Source: Shinty
