Since Edinburgh and District Motorcycle Club launched their Scottish Six Days Trial in the years before the First World War, the event has changed considerably in format, style and actual running of the whole thing. There’s been a variety of starting and finishing points, with Edinburgh and Fort William the two longest serving of these; the move to Fort William enforced by a gathering of the clans taking up all room in the city’s hotels in the late Seventies.
It is likely a change to a Fort William start and finish would have happened sooner rather than later, even if there hadn’t been hotel space issues. Trials bikes were no longer viewed as everyday transport and covering the 150 miles from Edinburgh to Fort William and back again at the end of the week was becoming soul destroying on motorcycles with increasingly lower overall gearing and minimal comfort. Once super sticky soft tyres were introduced, tyres unlikely to survive the heat from miles on the road, the Edinburgh start would have been impractical.
Words and descriptions familiar to us in 2021 would be equally familiar to riders in the early part of the last century, when not only was the sport new but also the concept of petrol powered personal transport to do it on. So we blithely describe as ‘sections’ those bits of a course where an eagle-eyed official records an attempt to negotiate difficult terrain and riders strive for a ‘clean’ as they go through them.
In the Scottish of 110 years ago,
