Southwest Missouri Celtic Heritage Festival & Highland Games

The Southwest Missouri Celtic Heritage Festival & Highland Games celebrates the heritage of the Buffalo Head Prairie and the immigrants from the Celtic region that settled in the area and created Buffalo, MO. The Celtic region includes Brittany (Breizh), Cornwall (Kernow), Wales (Cymru), Scotland (Alba), Ireland (Éire), and the Isle of Man (Mannin or Ellan Vannin).

 

Hosted by the Buffalo Area Chamber of Commerce, the Southwest Missouri Celtic Heritage Festival & Highland Games have been providing a family-friendly cultural and educational experience for 20 years. The festival takes place the weekend after Labor Day at the Buffalo City Park/Dallas County Fairgrounds on Ramsey Street in Buffalo, MO.

 

The Southwest Missouri Celtic Heritage Festival & Highland Games showcases traditional music, vendors, demonstrations, and Clan Row, which features many of the clans with origins from the Celtic regions. Clans represented provide a living history of their clan from Scotland to their influence in the creation of America. They also provide information for Genealogical study and resources for those wishing to further their ties to the people from the Celtic areas in history.

 

The Highland Games feature traditional competition classes, including Braemar stone toss, open stone toss, weight for distance, weight over bar, heavy and light hammer, sheaf toss, caber toss, and more. Both men and women compete in the Highland Games.

Festival origins ~

The first Celtic Heritage Festival and Highlands Games were held in 2002 in Buffalo. Local resident, Monty Viets, got the ball rolling when he started researching his own Celtic heritage. He had been learning about the Montgomery side of his family and ran across Clan Montgomery, a genealogical organization that traces its family roots back to Viking Normandy and Celtic Wales and Scotland.

Interested in learning more about the clan heritage, Viets attended a Clan Montgomery Association meeting at a Celtic festival in Tulsa, Okla., in addition to a festival in St. Louis. He was interested in Buffalo presenting a similar Celtic festival, and ultimately, the Buffalo Area Chamber of Commerce and the Buffalo Optimist Club helped organize the local event.