Stone Lifting

Eighteenth century onwards · Implement tradition

Stone lifting is the oldest continuous strength tradition in the European corpus and the only one whose lineage runs unbroken from before the Iron Game into the present. It is older than the music-hall era, was performed alongside it, and has substantially outlived it in the modern strongman repertoire.

Description

Stone lifting is a class of lift rather than a single lift: a strength performance involving a fixed, named, locally-kept stone or set of stones. The implements are usually granite or basalt boulders, often with iron rings driven into them for grip, sitting in fixed locations — at coaching inns, churches, farms — and lifted by passing strength athletes for tradition rather than for federation contest. Successful lifts are recorded by the custodians of the stones rather than by an external sanctioning body.

The principal traditions are Scottish (the Dinnie Stones, the Inver Stone, the Manhood Stones at Aboyne and elsewhere); Icelandic (the Húsafell Stone, the Fullsterkur lifting stones, the Leirárgarðar stone); and Basque (the harri-jasotzaileak tradition of competitive cylinder, sphere, cube, and rectangle lifting, contested at fairs and Sunday meets across the Basque country).

Rules and traditions

Each lifting stone has its own established rules. The Dinnie Stones require the lifter to clear both stones from the ground simultaneously by their iron rings, with no straps; the Húsafell Stone has a graded set of three challenges (knee-height, post, full circuit of the sheep pen); the Inver Stone is lifted to a chest-and-shoulder position. The Basque harri-jasotzaileak tradition codifies stones of fixed shape and weight and contests them on a count of repetitions in a fixed time.

The stones are not contested under a unified federation; the local custodians (the Potarch Hotel for Dinnie, the Húsafell farm, the Basque pelota clubs) maintain their own registers and judge their own attempts.

History

The Húsafell Stone tradition is documented from the eighteenth century, used by the Húsafell pastor Snorri Björnsson as a strength test for shepherds. The Dinnie Stones were already known by 1880 as Donald Dinnie's, with the originating carry conventionally dated to 1860. The Basque harri-jasotzaileak tradition is documented from the early nineteenth century in its modern form, although stone lifting at fairs predates that.

Through the music-hall era these traditions ran alongside but largely separate from the Iron Game proper: the strongmen of the variety circuit performed in halls, while the stone lifters performed at coaching inns and Sunday fairs. The two traditions began to intersect in the late twentieth century with the founding of the World's Strongest Man competition in 1977 and its incorporation of stone-lifting events.

Modern continuity

Stone lifting is one of the few elements of pre-1950 strength culture to have entered modern strongman essentially intact. The Atlas Stones, McGlashen Stones, and Húsafell-style stones contested at the World's Strongest Man are direct descendants of the older traditions, modified for television and standardisation but recognisably continuous.