Organisation
The Inverness Highland Games are organised by the Highland Council in partnership with a committee representing the various organisations which participate in the Gathering.
In July 2010 the date of Games was moved from the third weekend of July to the penultimate weekend in July to enable the Games to connect with the staging of the Inverness Armed Forces Day Celebrations and create one of Scotland's largest traditional Gatherings.
The 2010 Games also saw one significant other change in that the event was relocated from Bught Park at the west end of Inverness to its former home in Northern Meeting Park which is located just outside Inverness city centre.
Northern Meeting Park had been the venue for Highland Games organised in Inverness by the Northern Meeting Society from 1864 to 1938. In July 1939 the Northern Meeting Society decided that they wished to stop organising the Games after losing money for nine years. It was agreed that the Inverness Shopkeepers Association would be invited to take over the running of the Games but plans for a September 1939 event was abandoned as a result of the outbreak of the Second World War. The Games were staged in Northern Meeting Park for a final time in 1948 before it was decided that they would be moved to Bught Park.
While the heavy events at Inverness remain the highlight of the Gathering, the Inverness Games are fampous for being a celebration of all aspects of Highland culture and for regularly featuring performances from overseas groups.
In 2009 Inverness played host to a full scale Basque Rural Games staged by the group Nazioen Mundua from Northern Spain and adopted an official Games Tartan - the Inverness Basque Tartan - which featured the Green, Red and White colours of the Basque flag. The strengthening of the links between the two regions has led to plans for the Inverness Highland Games to go on tour for the first time in its history in October 2010 when a "Taste of the Inverness Highland Games" will be staged in Pamplona
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Famous quotes containing the word organisation:
“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)