Royal Highland Show: What to wear to the agricultural event of the year

Sheep shearing is always a popular event at The Royal Highland Show, Ingliston, Edinburgh Pic: RHS

If you’re heading to The Royal Highland Show today the most important thing to remember is it’s Scotland. It’s probably going to rain. It’s an indoor and outdoor event set in 280 acres at Ingliston, There may be brief interludes where the sun appears and the temperature crawls into double figures but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t. If I had a waterproof item of clothing for every time someone’s told me ‘Remember there’s no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong type of clothing’ I’d be bone dry.

A quick glance at The RHS website, which advises that ‘Scotland often serves up all four seasons in one day’, is proof that outdoor folk know how to dress for the weather. Expect the show ground to be awash with outfits in greens and browns instilled with varying degrees of waterproofing and thermal properties. There will be wax jackets, gilets, leather riding boots, wellies, overalls and hats. If you make your living outdoors, you’ll already have a wardrobe full of this stuff, but for the rest of us, the RHS website advises layering and a waterproof.

From experience, layering is crucial, especially for those of us who will be hotfooting it to the muscly men (and women) in vests events - farriery and sheep shearing, both favourites of my friend Country Girl and me - because you might want to divest yourself of a couple of layers when it gets steamy in those sheds.

The Forestry competition at The Royal Highland Show, Ingliston, Edinburgh. Pic: RHS

Which brings us to waterproofing. Having been literally soaked to the skin far too often this year, on the West Highland Way in May and last weekend walking from Yair to Innerleithen on our latest stage of the Southern Upland Way, having finished The John Muir Way, after the hail started just as we left the relative shelter of Three Brethren cairns behind, I’ve decided I’m done stripping off in car parks to put on a whole new set of dry clothes at the end of a day’s walk thanks to inadequate outerwear.

Where once I trawled designer clearance sales and lusted after ‘going out’ clothes, now I’m to be found in outdoor shops poring over jacket labels, studying the technicals to see how many layers of GORE-TEX, HyVent or Hydroshell it’s possible to get into one item of clothing.

So at The Royal Highland Show, after marvelling at the grand parade, watching the horses, tramping round our favourite attractions of the sheep shed (Country Girl), and sheepdog trials (me), then judging the Highland Cows’ blow drys and admiring the shepherd’s crooks and knitwear, not forgetting a visit to Scotland’s Larder in association with The Scotsman, we’ll be heading to the clothing section.

There Country Girl will fondle the Cattleman Akubra hats yet again and I’ll wonder if this will be the year she’ll succumb, while I’ll be reacquainting myself with a Hoggs of Fife man’s waterproof jacket I fell in love with in the Green Welly Stop at Tyndrum on the West Highland Way but stupidly didn’t buy because I was sure the weather was going to improve, gullible fool that I am, plus I was giving my 29-year old Berghaus one last chance. The weather did pick up, short term, and I walked into Fort William sporting a tan, but you’re never far away from the next rain shower and the Royal Highland Show seems like the ideal place to stock up on clothes that are designed with Scotland in mind.

Plus I know that if I buy a waterproof coat, you can guarantee that the sun will shine.

www.royalhighlandshow.org