JerryBellune@yahoo.com

Competing sounded like a good idea to Katie and Diana Hall of Red Bank.

Katie’s husband David last year decided he wanted to compete in the Tartan Day South’s Highland Games.

The games have a long history, dating to the Scottish clans that used them to prepare warriors for war.

The Scottish highland games began as exercises for fierce clan warriors.

Today they are tests of strength not only for burly men but petite women.

This year, Katie, 33, who works at Fred Anderson Toyota, and their daughter Diana, 13, a student at White Knoll Middle School, decided it looked like fun to join the competition in the women’s division.

In the 9 years of the Tartan Day South at the Historic Columbia Speedway in Cayce, they may be the 1st family of 3 to compete.

The women are a sisterhood who encourage and inspire each other.

Historians believe the games began in Scotland 1,000 years ago during Druid times as tests of strength and conditioning.

A tree trunk was made into a caber and tossed by the strongest men. Smooth rocks from river beds were heaved for distance. Other strength tests included tossing a sheep’s body over a high bar.

Before animal lovers become upset, they should know that the “sheep” is actually a 20-pound weight.

The Scots were fierce fighters who resented English invaders who outlawed their games and culture including kilts and bagpipes.

Over the centuries, the games evolved into festivals with the addition of dancing, music, food and drink.

Tartan Day South here covers 4 days with children’s events and a Sunday religious service.

Just as women competed in highland dancing, they began competing as drum majors, pipers and drummers and dramatically in the heavy events.

Tartan Day South attracts many re-enactors of various historic periods. One was Robert Woods of Lexington, who dressed colorfully in a red, white and blue naval uniform as Admiral John Paul Jones, a Scotsman often called the “Father of the American Navy.”

Jones was a young nation’s first well-known naval commander in the Revolutionary War. His actions in British waters during the revolution earned him an international reputation.

Wood said in his own life he served 12 years in the US Navy as a torpedo man on ships and submarines. Woods enjoys portraying Benjamin Franklin, the publisher, inventor and diplomat who enlisted the French assistance that helped the British colonies win independence for schools and other groups.

Placing a hand over his abdomen, he said, “I look a lot like Ben Franklin.”