Canada’s Simon Fraser University take first at the World Piping Championships

Simon Fraser University Pipe Band from Vancouver won this year’s World Pipe Band Championships at Glasgow Green. It was their third win, this time leaving their rival and last year’s winner, Northern Ireland’s Field Marshal Montgomery Pipe Band in second place. In third place was the House of Edgar Shotts and Dykehead Pipe Band, who have won the competition a staggering fifteen times. Simon Fraser University also took the first prize for Drumming.

The event – linked with Glasgow since 1948 – was a huge success, helped by good weather for the over forty thousand who came to hear it. There were a total of eight thousand musicians in two hundred and twenty bands from fifteen countries. The economic impact is very significant, estimated as bringing £10million into Glasgow.

Great news for Argyll is that Inveraray and District Pipe Band were also world champions for the second time – last year in the Novice section, this year in the Juvenile section.

Other successes for Argyll PIpe Bands included second in the Grade 4A Competition for the Isle of Islay Black Bottle Pipe Band; and Kintyre Schools who came fourth in the Novice and third in the Juvenile competitions.