Donald Dinnie

8 June 1837 – 2 April 1916 · Aboyne, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

Donald Dinnie was the dominant figure in nineteenth-century Scottish Highland Games athletics and one of the earliest professional strength athletes whose career is reasonably documented. He won, by his own count, more than 11,000 prizes in a competitive career that ran from 1855 into the 1890s. He gives his name to the Dinnie Stones at Potarch, and through them to the modern stone-lifting tradition.

Origins

Dinnie was born in Aboyne, on Royal Deeside in Aberdeenshire, in June 1837. His father, Robert Dinnie, was a local stonemason and athlete; the son took up Highland Games events — caber, hammer, stone-putting, wrestling, jumping, sprinting — in his teens and was already a leading figure on the Aberdeenshire circuit by his early twenties. Highland Games athletics in this period was a paid, partly itinerant profession: champions toured the summer games circuit across Scotland and northern England, taking cash prizes at each meet.

The work

Dinnie competed across the Scottish, English, and later North American and Australasian Highland Games circuits for nearly forty years. He was unusually tall — over 6 ft (183 cm) — and at his peak weighed around 220 lb (100 kg), which made him competitive in events that rewarded both height and absolute strength. He toured North America in 1870–1872, returned several times, and made an extended tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1883–1884 from which he came back wealthy. He continued to compete into his fifties.

His public reputation as a strongman, beyond the Highland Games circuit, rested on a single feat: the carrying of the Potarch stones. The story, in the form Dinnie himself gave it in later interviews, is that as a young man he carried the two granite blocks — together 332.5 kg (733 lb) — across the bridge over the River Dee at Potarch, a distance of approximately 5 m, while the stones were being used as anchors during repairs to the bridge. The date is conventionally given as 1860. The episode itself is documented only through Dinnie's later recollections; what is firm is that the stones were already known by 1880 as Dinnie's, and that they have stood as an open challenge in Scottish strength culture ever since.

"There is no man living who has lifted them since I lifted them, and there will be none until a man comes who has my hands."

Notable feats

Dinnie's documented Highland Games figures, recorded across the major meets of the 1860s and 1870s, include:

• Caber toss championships at Braemar, Aboyne, and Lonach across multiple years from 1856 onwards.
• Stone-putting (28 lb stone) of around 14.6 m (48 ft).
• Hammer throw (22 lb hammer) of around 36 m (118 ft).
• Heavy weight throw (56 lb weight) of around 9.4 m (31 ft).
• Carry of the Potarch stones — 188 kg + 144.5 kg = 332.5 kg (733 lb) — across the Potarch bridge, c. 1860.

Method

Dinnie left no training book. Such accounts as survive — interviews with the Scottish sporting press, his own retrospective writing in retirement — describe a programme built around the events themselves: caber and hammer practice on the family ground, distance running, wrestling, regular work with the heavy implements. He was sceptical of the dumbbell training advocated by Sandow and the music-hall lifters, regarding it (in one 1890s interview) as work that built the appearance of strength rather than the strength itself.

Legacy

Dinnie's legacy is the stone-lifting tradition. The Potarch stones, by being his and by being left in place outside a working coaching inn, established the model — a permanent, attempt-able, witnessable test in a fixed location — that the modern Highland Games and World's Strongest Man traditions have inherited. The first credible modern double lift of the stones was made by Henry Gray of Aberdeen in 1972; the list of subsequent successful lifters now includes Jamie Reeves, Bill Kazmaier, Žydrūnas Savickas, Eddie Hall, Stefan Solvi Petursson, and Tom Stoltman, and in recent years a small but growing number of women lifters.

Dinnie himself died in London in April 1916, in modest circumstances; the Australian touring fortune had been spent. His grave is in Aboyne. The stones remain at the Potarch Hotel, which manages access for present-day attempts.

Disputed and unresolved

The 1860 carry of the Potarch stones is the central episode and the least well-documented. There is no contemporary press account of the carry itself; the earliest written accounts are Dinnie's own from later in his career. The reasonable position, taken by Webster and by the Stark Center's writing on the stones, is that some episode of the kind almost certainly took place — Dinnie was recognised in his own lifetime as the man who had moved the stones — but that the precise circumstances (the year, the exact distance, whether the stones cleared the ground simultaneously) cannot now be reconstructed with certainty.

Dinnie's career prize tally of "more than 11,000" is his own figure, repeated by his biographers; it is plausible for a forty-year Highland Games career across multiple circuits but should be treated as approximate.