Fergus Scottish Festival celebrates 80-year run

An annual festival in Fergus has been honouring Scotland’s culture since 1946.

The Fergus Scottish Festival & Highland Games brought the sound of bagpipes and drums to the city

The event is a tradition that’s brought around 25,000 people to the Centre Wellington Community Sportsplex every year, according to Elizabeth Bender, the festival’s executive director.

“It’s important to us and it has been for the last 79 years, leading up to this big weekend, that the festival started to celebrate local culture and the local community and our Scottish history and roots,” said Bender. “And all of these years later, we’re continuing to do the exact same thing.”

Bender said the festival was full of 80th anniversary branded merchandise throughout the grounds, especially a custom made tartan kilt worn by some of the almost 400 volunteers.

According to the festival’s website, the special tartan was made with a thread count that symbolizes August 17, 1946, the date the festival was founded.

Bender said many attendees are regulars at the event, with some expressing to her how much the festival means to them.

“We have a lot of history within the festival with families and groups that have been coming for a really long time and there’s very much a reunion feel to it,” she said. “So, we’re hearing a lot of stories of ‘Our families are now connected because we met at the festival and we have a shared Scottish history,’ so, that’s really, really special for us and very exciting.”

Attendees at the festival were able to enjoy pipe bands, live music, various heavy lifting competitions and line dancing workshops.

Charles Vandervaart, an actor on the Outlander series, grew up north of Fergus in Orangeville. He said though he’s mainly Dutch, the show has helped him embrace his Scottish side from his grandmother.

“I’m fully embracing it and I’m here at the festival and enjoying that beautiful culture,” he said.

Vandervaart attended the three-day event on its last day, Sunday, participating in a workshop for Scottish line dancing called ceilidh.

“The nice thing about a ceilidh is, most of the time, the way it’s run is you do this dance, they teach you how to do it. You dance with a partner, it’s a great time,” he said. “I don’t even know the dances by heart. [You] just learn it as you go but that’s kind of the fun part about it — messing up. I don’t think you can be bad at ceilidh as long as you commit. That’s the whole point, right? And it’s about having fun. If you got two left feet, you can still ceilidh.”

Vandervaart said celebrating personal culture is important to understand history.

“I think it’s important to understand why I’m Canadian and what the story was there and understanding myself,” he said. “It kind of opened my eyes to the good and the bad of that history and the colonial past that my ancestors have and kind of respecting the land, respecting the people that were here before me and are the original custodians of what we call Canada now.”

Attendees of the festival echoed Vandervaart’s words.

“I think if you’re not coming out to celebrate [the culture] and keeping it going for our age and younger, then it’s going to die off eventually with the older family members and you’re not going to learn about it or continue to know about where you came from,” said attendee Haylea Savoy.

“Keep the history going,” added her friend Nairn Major.