With a focus on health, strength and mental resilience, the Ardblair Stones is sponsored by Castle Water to enable the challenge to tour Scotland and visit various community-led events free of charge, promoting equality and diversity.

This unique strength athletics and International Highland Games Federation (IHGF) competition has now gone viral with video footage shared by LADbible ramping up 122 million Facebook views worldwide as Scotland’s strongest men and women battle it out to be crowned Scotland’s ‘King of Stones’.

The contest is now bound for the Mey Highland Games on Saturday, 3 August 2019 where chieftain, Prince Charles, the Duke of Rothesay, will be in attendance.

The Ardblair Stones event is fully accessible to all and features for the first time at Mey, Scotland’s only adaptive para-athlete Highland Games. The Invictus Games Foundation, founded by Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex to ‘harness the power of sport to inspire recovery’, has been promoting the event to ex-service men and women around the world, and participants are expected to include adaptive athletes as well as representatives from the Help for Heroes charity.

Recent attention has focussed on Alness pro-strongman, Tom Stoltman (25), who seized the ‘King of Stones’ title at Kirriemuir Agricultural Show on 13 July 2019.

However, the competition is being fiercely contested with pro-Strongman, Luke ‘The Highland Oak’ Stoltman, determined to steal the title from his brother at the Mey Games this Saturday, 3 August 2019. Luke came seventh in this year’s World’s Strongest Man competition in Bradenton, Florida.

This will be no mean feat. Together, the Stoltman-two are referred to as the World’s Strongest Brothers, but Scotland’s Strongest Man and World’s Strongest Man fifth-place finalist, Tom, loaded all 9 stones, including the final stone weighing in at 152kg (335lbs), onto the 1.32-meter-tall barrels in a superfast time of just 22.18 seconds. He shaved nearly 5 seconds off the previous world record set by Laurencekirk strongman,

Paul ‘Bad Boy’ Benton. Meanwhile, Luke placed third (32.94s) with Glencarse man, Janis Skujins, coming second (26.06s) after breaking his own previous record.

The Ardblair Stones tour of Scotland journeys from Bishopton on the south-west coast to the Mey Highland Games at the northerly tip of mainland Scotland before heading for an action-packed King of Stones Grand Final at Blairgowrie & Rattray Highland Games on Sunday, 8 September 2019.

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