Dinnie Stones

What links two enormous lumps of granite in Aberdeenshire with Darth Vader? No, this isn't one of our dodgy cryptic clues. The answer is strength. Lots of it.

In 1963, British weightlifting champion David Prowse managed to lift the Dinnie Stones (also known as the Dinnie Stanes) at Potarch weighing a combined 332kg. He used straps, but given that's roughly the weight of the Fabulous North team combined (after our new year diets), I'm not going to mark him down for it. Wor Dave then swapped the stones for a lightsaber and played Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies.

But he wasn't the first to lift them. We have to go back nearly 200 years where a chap called Donald Dinnie was born near Aboyne in 1837. When writing this article, I kept on wanting to call him Donnie Dinnie, so tell me if I slip up, although I think it has a cooler sound.

Now Donnie... sorry, Donald was a big lad and entered a local strongman competition at Kincardine O'Neil and won, coming away with a whopping £1 prize.

Not exactly Premier League wages, but apparently enough encouragement for Donald to spend much of the next 50 years throwing, lifting and carrying increasingly ridiculous objects around the world.

Before all that, however, came the feat that would make his name around here.

The granite boulders hadn't been created for strongmen to show off with. In the 1830s, large iron rings had been attached to them so they could be used as counterweights for scaffolding while maintenance was carried out on the nearby bridge.

The smaller stone weighs 144.5kg. The larger one weighs 188kg. Together they're a shade over 332kg, or 733lb if you prefer your terrifyingly heavy objects in old money. Donald looked at both of them and presumably thought, Aye, I'll carry those.

In 1860, he lifted the two stones by their iron rings using his bare hands and carried them the width of Potarch Bridge, a distance of just over five metres. Not bad for a 23 year old. I think at that age my biggest test of strength was trying to separate two frozen burgers with a butter knife.

Five metres doesn't sound particularly impressive until you remember he was carrying a third of a tonne of granite. I've carried two bags of compost from the car at once because I couldn't be bothered making another trip and then needed fruity malt and a little lie down.

Far from being a bloke who performed one ridiculous feat beside a bridge and then went back to chiselling stone, he became one of the great athletes of the Victorian era.

He competed at Highland Games across Scotland before turning professional and travelling internationally. His career took him across Britain, North America, Australia, New Zealand and beyond, competing in wrestling, throwing events and feats of strength. His athletic career stretched across around half a century and he was still performing into his seventies.

But while Donald's reputation travelled around the world, his stones stayed at Potarch. And then they disappeared. After the First World War, the whereabouts of the Dinnie Stones were apparently lost.

Two granite boulders weighing a combined third of a tonne might seem quite difficult to misplace, but somehow that's exactly what happened. For decades, the stones behind one of Scotland's most famous feats of strength were simply gone. Until 1953. Scottish strength historian (now that is a profession I can get behind) David Webster began looking for them and eventually tracked them down.

Once identified, the stones began attracting attention again and a new generation of strongmen started wondering the same thing Donald Dinnie had more than a century earlier. Could I lift those? Most couldn't.

Then David Prowse arrived in the early 1960s. Before Star Wars, Prowse was a serious strength athlete and British heavyweight weightlifting champion. Using straps around the iron rings, he managed to lift both stones together.

A decade later, Belfast man Jack Shanks took things considerably further. In 1972 he became the first recorded person in modern times to lift both stones from the ground using his bare hands. The following year he carried them the historic distance, finally recreating Dinnie's famous feat more than a century later.

And here is Potarch Bridge, where Dinnie made his famous five metre carry. Appropriately, it's now just a stone's throw from where the Dinnie Stones currently sit.

Since then the Dinnie Stones have become something of a pilgrimage for strength athletes from around the world. More than 400 people have now managed to get both stones off the ground, or as it's rather wonderfully known, "put the wind beneath the stones".

The stones had one more little adventure when the old Potarch Hotel closed for renovation in 2013 and they were temporarily moved into the care of the Aboyne Highland Games committee. They returned in 2016 and today you'll find them in the grounds of the Potarch Café and Restaurant.

You can still attempt to lift the Dinnie Stones today, although there are proper rules if you want your effort officially recognised. I briefly considered having a go myself, but I'd already carried my camera bag from the car and didn't want to overdo it.

So these two lumps of rock were carried by Donald Dinnie, disappeared for decades, were rediscovered and have since been lifted, dragged and sworn at by generations of some of the strongest people on the planet. And Darth Vader. Not bad for a couple of bits of old scaffolding equipment.