There are tartans of all colors flapping around the thighs of participants and those attending at the 65th annual Ligonier Highland Games at Idlewild Park & SoakZone.
They’re worn by the caber tossers, the bagpipers, casual shoppers and toddlers alike.
But there wouldn’t be any at all without the mountains of wool sheared by folks like Melinda Wamsley of Washington.
Wamsley is the owner of Boss Mare Shearing. And as the heat of the day started cranking up on Saturday morning, Wamsley was sweating as she delicately balanced a North Country Cheviot sheep on her boot toe, which was noticeably flat.
It’s a small-but-important aspect of sheep-shearing, Wamsley said, made all the more noticeable when the sheep thrashed and kicked for a few seconds.
“The sheep don’t touch the ground,” Wamsley said. “If you saw when she hit the ground, that’s when she started bucking.”
Wamsley calls the Highlands Games her own personal “Celtic Crossfit.”
“I compete in the athletics, and then I run over here four times during the day to do shearing,” she said with a laugh.
Wamsley uses electric shears powered by a small, 3-horsepower motor — because while it looks cool to use the old-school oversized sheep shears, it’s not nearly as efficient.
“The world record for actual shears is still somewhere around 2 minutes,” she said. “The world record with the electric trimmer is under 30 seconds.”
Both at the games and at home in Washington County, Wamsley is right next door to the folks who pick up what she cuts away. Members of the Ross Farm, which has been in Washington County since 1910, gather up the shorn wool and begin washing, carding (passing it through wire-toothed rollers to straighten the fibers) and spinning it.
“It’s great,” Wamsley said. “I shear, and then (fifth- and sixth-generation farmers) Amy Ross Manko and Drew Manko — who sent me to shearing school — start processing it.”
It isn’t quite as popular as the caber toss, but the shearing demonstrations regularly gather a crowd.
That includes Wamsley’s border collie — it immediately springs into action when it sees the freshly-sheared sheep take a few steps away from the crowd, cutting it off and herding it back toward its small pen.
It might not be glorious work, but it’s plenty necessary, Wamsley said.
“It’s something that has to be done,” she said. “Sheep don’t shed, and they’ll overheat under that thick coat.”
The Highlands Games will continue through the day on Saturday at Idlewild, 2574 Route 30 in Ligonier. The final games will begin at 5:30 p.m. For more, see LigonierHighlandGames.org.
Patrick Varine is a TribLive reporter covering Delmont, Export and Murrysville. He is a Western Pennsylvania native and joined the Trib in 2010 after working as a reporter and editor with the former Dover Post Co. in Delaware. He can be reached at pvarine@triblive.com.