Hailes (ball game)

Hailes or clacken is a Scottish ball game which dates to the 18th century and achieved its widest popularity in the nineteenth.

The clacken, or clackan, is described in the Scottish National Dictionary as "a wooden hand-bat or racquet used by boys at The Edinburgh Academy and Royal High School".

"All would be armed with clackans, wooden bats suitable for playing shinty, or hails or hitting other boys' heads" (from E. S. Haldane's Scotland of our Fathers, 1933).

In recent years it survives only at the Edinburgh Academy, where it is used in an annual Hailes match of the Ephors versus the Leavers (or non-Ephors) and in athletics where they run a clacken-and-ball race.

The two parties then place themselves in the middle between the two goals, or dules, and one of the persons, taking a soft elastic ball about the size of a man's fist, tosses it into the air and as it falls strikes it with his palm towards his antagonists.

The object of the game is for either party to drive the ball beyond the goal which lies before them, while their opponents do all in their power to prevent this."

Less than thirty years ago [i.e. in the 1880s] no High School boy considered his equipment complete unless the wooden clacken hung to his wrist as he went and came".

The original game had no goals as we know them today but a dule or hails-line that ran the full width of the playing area.

Old records suggest that when the dules were fixed at a great distance apart (400 m or so), the winning team was the one that scored the first hail.