Innerleithen Games Week
History, Tradition and the Road to the Bicentenary
Every July, the Scottish Borders town of Innerleithen, puts pretty much everything on hold for ten days. Shops & houses decorate their windows, pubs and restaurants gear up for a spike in bookings, bands take to the High Street, and the town's calendar centers around the Innerleithen St Ronan's Border Games, a tradition that started in 1827 and has barely missed a year since.[1]. In 2026, Games Week ran from 11 to 18 July, with the Cleikum Ceremony on Friday.[5][6] That date matters more than usual this year, because 2026 is the 199th running of the Games. Next year, The Innerleithen Games celebrates its bicentenary, two hundred years of the oldest organised athletics meeting in Scotland!
Where the Innerleithen Games started
St Ronan's Border Games was founded in 1827 by James Hogg, a Scottish poet, novelist and essayist, widely known as the Ettrick Shepherd (he worked as a shepherd when he was a young man), who, alongside his friend and rival Sir Walter Scott, did more than most to shape how the Borders saw itself in the early nineteenth century.[12]
That September, the Games ran as a sort of mini-Olympics for the district. Enthusiastic amateur sportsmen travelled in from Edinburgh, Cumbria and across the Borders to compete in sprints, middle-distance races, the triple jump, high jump, long jump, shot put, hammer and wrestling. In the earliest years there was a second day of sport too, given over to rifle shooting and archery. The archery was contested for the Silver Arrow, which still exists today and sits on display, alongside the St Ronan's Bow, at St Ronan's Wells.
Some of the old events have simply fallen away. Innerleithen once had its own version of handba', played between teams from Traquair (south of the Tweed) and Leithen (north of the river), kicking off roughly where the War Memorial now stands and running along the strip of ground between the Leithen Water and the dam. No records survive of who won which year, but by all accounts the rivalry got fierce enough that the game was quietly dropped before somebody got seriously hurt (that doesn;t surprise us). Whippet racing had a run too, introduced in 1924 and popular for some years after. Quoits, tossing the caber, tug o' war, and, for anyone fancying their chances, climbing a greased pole, all featured as well, with winners typically taking home a silver medal or a Blue Border bonnet.
The Games Week as we'd recognise them today really took shape in 1921, when professional running was introduced, and the betting that went with it. It wasn't a popular change with everyone at the time. Plenty of people were sorry to see amateur athletics give way to prize money, but it reflected what ordinary working people in the town actually wanted from their Games Day. One race has survived from very close to the beginning almost unchanged: the Steeplechase, still known locally as "the race up Curly," run over much of its original 1829 course and for many years the closing event of the whole meeting. Its modern counterpart, the "Round the Town Race," is a comparatively recent addition, sending runners out along Traquair Road, Miller Street, Waverley Road and the High Street. In 1993, Suzanne Douglas became the first woman to win it.
The venue has moved with the town over the years. The very first Games were held on flat ground on the west bank of the Leithen known as "The Batty," named after the archery butts once used there, and now the site of Leithen Crescent. When Leithen Mill and the gasworks were built, the Games shifted around 1846 to a tighter spot known as "The Green," opposite the Cuddy Brig. From 1872 until the 1890s, Pirn Haugh was the venue of choice, before the Games eventually settled at Victoria Park, where they've stayed ever since.
Individual names run right through this history. At the very first meeting in 1827, Innerleithen's George Scougall, described at the time as "an ox feller," won the wrestling and was presented his medal by Professor John Wilson, better known by his pen name Christopher North. The following year Andrew Burnet of Traquair took the standing hop, step and leap, and Thomas Anderson, a tailor nicknamed "Tam the Rat" for his small stature, cleared 5 feet 3 inches in the high leap in 1829. Between 1832 and 1835, William Leyden of Denholm dominated almost every discipline he entered: high jump, shot, sprinting, wrestling, the triple jump, winning every event he took part in during 1835. His descendant later loaned two of his original silver medals back to the Games in 2005, and they're now on display at St Ronan's Wells alongside the Silver Arrow. In the 1870s, Tom Aitken of Walkerburn put together the kind of all-round record that would put a modern decathlete to shame: 9.6 seconds for 100 yards, a 22-foot long jump, a mile in 4 minutes 42 seconds, before emigrating to America in 1879, where he kept competing. More recently, names like the Whiteford and Lothian families, David Currie, Sandy Pow, Ian Gordon, Rab Thomson and Brian Slingsby have carried the tradition on through the professional circuit, with Charlie Russell training generations of local runners along the way.
Two of the Games' oldest trophies have surprisingly international roots. The American Cup, for the 800 metres handicap open to local under-18s, was presented by the USA Peeblesshire Society in 1914. The New Zealand Cup came later, a gift from "Innerleithen Old Boys Residing in New Zealand," first awarded in 1950 for the Youths' 200 metres. It's a nice reminder of how far the town's emigrants carried its name, and how many of them thought to send something back.
The Cleikum Ceremonies
The sporting side of Games Week is only half the story. The other half, the Cleikum Ceremonies, has its roots not in athletics but in fiction.
In 1823, Sir Walter Scott published St Ronan's Well, a novel set in a fictional Borders spa town.[2] In it, he described the sign hanging outside the fictional Cleikum Inn: on one side, St Ronan catching the devil by the leg with his crook. Scott later explained the name itself: "cleikum" comes from "cleikin'," the action of hooking or catching, the same way a shepherd might catch a straying lamb by the hind leg. The novel was a huge success, and it did no harm to business to let people assume the real town of Innerleithen was the place Scott had in mind. Tourism picked up. The Games, founded by Hogg just a few years later in 1827, were in part a way of giving locals something to enjoy and visitors something to watch during that busier "season."
The formal Cleikum Ceremony itself is younger than the Games by seventy years. Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897 set off a wave of civic pageantry across Britain, and Innerleithen's Games committee responded by commissioning a new ceremonial banner from local poet, painter and watercolourist, George Hope Tait, the same man responsible for the town's Burgh Arms. For a few years the banner was unfurled informally, but in 1900 the town decided to give it a proper public occasion. On 17 August that year, Chapel Street Hall was packed for what was billed as "The Nicht Afore The Morn," where the banner was formally presented to that year's Standard Bearers.
The following year, on Friday 16 August 1901, the first true Cleikum Ceremony took place at the Volunteer Hall, now converted to flats at the west end of the High Street, in front of a crowd estimated at a thousand people. That first ceremony set the format still followed today: a local schoolboy, chosen as dux of his year, was installed as the town's "titular St Ronan," handed the lamp and staff that symbolise the role. A younger boy took on the part of Lantern Bearer. The installation speech given to the new St Ronan that night, asking him to "watch and pray" and to "despise evil" in the saint's name, is remarkably still used word for word at the ceremony well over a century later.
Behind all of it sits an older piece of local folklore: that Innerleithen was founded in AD 737 by a wandering pilgrim monk named Ronan, who is said to have "cleiked" the devil by the leg and driven him out of the town for good.[7] Whether or not the story predates Scott's novel, or grew up partly because of it, it's the legend the whole ceremony exists to keep alive. Going by the size of the crowds each July, it's working :-)
Innerleithen Games Week Today
The modern programme has grown well beyond its original two days, but the shape of the week is fairly settled from year to year:[3]
Thursday: A social evening for the district's senior citizens in the Memorial Hall, with entertainment, supper and dancing[4]
Friday: The Ex-Standard Bearers' Association dinner-dance
Saturday: A football fives tournament in Victoria Park, followed by the Standard Bearer's Ball in a marquee at St Ronan's Community School
Sunday: St Ronan's Silver Band leads the parade of principals to the Parish Church for the "Kirkin'," the service that formally opens Games Week. The Innerleithen Pipe Band and St Ronan's Silver Band play in the High Street that afternoon
Monday: An open Car Treasure Hunt sets off from the Memorial Hall forecourt at 5.30pm
Tuesday: Children's Sports and Treat in Victoria Park from 6.30pm, with a children's entertainer for the younger ones at the Vale Club and a disco in the Memorial Hall for the 8 to 13s
Wednesday: A quieter evening for the committee, though Lodge St Ronan's runs an open Quiz Night
Thursday: Fancy Dress judging in Victoria Park at 7pm, followed by the Fancy Dress Parade through the High Street, one of the visual highlights of the week
Friday, Cleikum Ceremonies: The Dux Boy is installed in the Memorial Hall from 7pm, followed by a short service "For the Fallen" at the War Memorial and a further ceremony at St Ronan's Wells, before the Torchlight Procession makes its way to a Masonic ceremony at the Parish Church
Saturday, Games Day: The Children's Flower Parade leaves Hall Street at 11am, followed by the "Race Round the Town" at 1.30pm and a massed pipe and brass band parade from the Vale Club. St Ronan's Border Games run in Victoria Park from 2 to 5pm. The day closes with "Beating the Retreat" in the High Street at 7pm and, at 10pm, the Torchlight Procession up Caerlee Hill for the week's signature closing moment, "Burning the De'il"
The hill above the field
Games Day in Victoria Park also plays host to the Lee Pen hill race, a 4.8km out-and-back with roughly 350 metres of climbing up the hill that overlooks the town from the north.[9] The field is small by national standards, usually around thirty runners, but it draws a loyal following from Borders athletics clubs and further afield.[10] The view from the top, out over the Moorfoots (known locally as The Granites and home to the Pipers Grave) towards Edinburgh, is reason enough on its own to make the climb. Locals who grew up watching it, and there are plenty who did, tend to call it the toughest and most respected event of the whole day, run by people who'd rather take on open hillside than a flat track.
The 2027 Innerleithen Games bicentenary
2026's Games Week is the last before Innerleithen marks two hundred consecutive years, war years aside, of St Ronan's Border Games. The Games have survived the Crimean War, both World Wars, and a global pandemic without breaking the thread back to that first meeting on the Batty. Nothing had been confirmed for the bicentenary in 2027 at the time of writing, but it's a fair bet Games Week that year will be one to see in person. Keep an eye on the St Ronan's Border Games website as details emerge.
Where to stay during Games Week
Games Week draws visitors, family and past principals back to the town, so central accommodation gets booked up early. 1 Chapel Street, fittingly just around the corner from where the very first Cleikum banner was presented in 1900, is a five-minute walk from the High Street, close enough to catch the parades and processions without needing to drive in.[11] It offers seven boutique-style self-catering studios, each with an en-suite shower, kitchenette, and a choice of king, double or twin beds, along with free fast WiFi and keyless check-in. Pets are welcome, and all seven rooms can be booked together for groups of up to sixteen, which suits a family or a group coming down for the week together.
Keep up to date
For 2027's bicentenary plans, check the St Ronan's Border Games website or their Facebook page closer to the date.
References
# | Source | What it supports |
1 | St. Ronan's Border Games — History | Founding by James Hogg in 1827; 2024 as the "197th Anniversary" (so 2026 = 199th); early events, venues (The Batty, The Green, Pirn Haugh, Victoria Park); handba', whippet racing, quoits etc.; professional running from 1921; the Steeplechase/"race up Curly"; Suzanne Douglas 1993; George Scougall, Andrew Burnet, Thomas Anderson, William Leyden, Tom Aitken; American Cup (1914) and New Zealand Cup (1950); Charlie Russell |
2 | St. Ronan's Border Games — The Cleik'um | St Ronan's Well published December 1823; origin of "cleikum"; 1897 Diamond Jubilee banner; 1900 "Nicht Afore The Morn"; first Cleikum Ceremony, Friday 16 August 1901; installation speech wording |
3 | St. Ronan's Border Games — Games Week (current official page) | Current day-by-day running order: Saturday football fives/Ball, Sunday Kirkin' and Children's Sports (3pm), Tuesday Over 60s Party Night, Wednesday quiet night/Quiz Night, Thursday Fancy Dress, Friday Cleikum Ceremonies, Saturday Games Day |
4 | St. Ronan's Border Games — Games Week (archived/older version) | Matches the article's schedule: Thursday senior citizens' social, Friday Ex-Standard Bearers' dinner-dance, ten-day week |
5 | Calendar Customs — Innerleithen Cleikum Ceremony & St Ronan's Border Games | 2026 dates: Games Week 11–18 July, Cleikum Ceremony Friday 17 July |
6 | Cleikum Mill Lodge — What's On | Confirms 2026 Games Week dates, 11–18 July |
7 | Wikipedia — Innerleithen | AD 737 founding legend; St Ronan as itinerant pilgrim monk arriving by coracle |
8 | Past Innerleithen — Home | St Ronan of Bute's death date, AD 737; James Hogg founding the St Ronan's Border Club |
9 | Penicuik Harriers — Lee Pen Hill Race, 15 July 2017 | Lee Pen hill race distance (4.8km) and climb (350m) |
10 | The Southern Reporter — Six Borderers make top ten at Innerleithen's 2026 Lee Pen hill-race | 2026 race result, field size (34 runners) |
11 | Room in the Borders — 1 Chapel Street, Innerleithen | Seven boutique self-catering studios, en-suite, kitchenette, WiFi, keyless entry, pets allowed, exclusive/group booking for up to 16 |
12 | St Ronan's Well published 1823; James Hogg leading the founding of the Games in 1827 |
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