Epic Celtic Battle Music - Lincoln Hilton

For the first time here at Dojo U, we recently rallied our students to form Team Dojo – a 'virtual band' made up from Dojo students all…

For centuries, there has been a long-held belief that bagpipes were classified as an instrument of war and were banned in the Act of Proscription of 1746.

The story goes that in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of 1745, culminating in the now infamous Battle of Culloden, possessing a set of pipes or playing bagpipes them was banned.

Unfortunately, history is always far more complicated than we think...

In my part of the world, “The Green Hills of Tyrol” is a staple of massed band performances. You can count on hearing it at some point at the beginning and end of each games day. It’s also used frequently for pipe band tuning—the second part is quite effective, since you are basically playing down the scale from High A. But this little workhorse of a tune is one of the oldest pipe band tunes in our repertoire today, and has quite an amazing story.

The next tune in our continuing series on the Pipe Tunes of the First World War, and our Battle of the Somme mini-series, is “The Taking of Beaumont Hamel.” This tune commemorates the capture of Beaumont Hamel in November 1916 but it also serves as a bookend to one of the great tragedies of the Battle of the Somme.