I Lifted the Original Atlas Stone

Okay so I didn’t lift the ‘original’ Atlas stone but I did lift what historians would call, its daddy, the Inver Stone. The Inver Stone is 118kg granite Stone from Scotland which has been lifted, reportedly, since the 1700s and, if you follow the ‘family tree’ of the modern Atlas stone backwards, you do end up at the Inver Stone. So… scratch those conditions, I did lift the original Atlas stone and I will hear no more comments on the matter, thank you very much.

Last week I travelled to Scotland and lifted the Inver Stone. As a historian of strength, this meant the absolute world to me for reasons I’ll go into in a few paragraphs. I spent months thinking about it, training for it and watching other people’s efforts with the intensity of a conspiracy theorist examining the Kennedy assassination. I may have become, to use a family idiom, a ‘bit much.’

But it paid off when I got my arms around the stone, pulled it into my lap and loaded it onto a whisky barrel at the Braemar Highland Games Centre in Scotland. As was my right, I then got to record my name in the official Inver book and drank my complimentary whisky… Obviously.

Before the Atlas Stone

So why did I, a man in his mid-thirties, care so much about a damn stone? As friends often remind me, there are plenty of rocks in Ireland crying out for someone to lift them. The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is history. For me, the Inver Stone, with its iconic ‘265’ numbering on one side, amounts to a living strength artifact.

The stone’s early history is murky. It may have been lifted as a test of strength as early as the seventeenth century, although much of that history has been reconstructed from local tradition. By the early twentieth century, Scottish strength athlete A.A. Cameron is said to have lifted it with the ease of a mother raising her toddler. At one stage the stone also served a practical purpose as a standard weight for measuring meal.

For most of the past century, the Inver Stone sat outside Inver Cottage, a private home in Scotland. Its owner became its de-facto keeper and thus an affable woman named June Richard became a key figure in the strength community. People would travel to June’s cottage from around the world, lift the stone and sign a record book she kept specifically to record people’s achievements. From anyone I’ve spoken to lifting the Inver Stone became a deeply personal experience, stemming largely from the kindness shown to them by June and her endless supply of tea and biscuits.

When June died in 2020, the Inver Stone was moved to the Braemar Highland Games Center where it presently sits. Spicing things up a bit, the Centre added a whisky barrel, and wisely a drop mat, for people to put the Inver on once it went airborne.

That, in itself, is a pretty cool history but it is not the reason why I drove two hours from Edinburgh airport to lift the Inver. In 1963, the Inver Stone was used in a strongman contest in Glasgow. Soon after a series of Inver inspired stones, known as ‘McGlashen Stones’ began appearing at Highland Games around Scotland. In this event athletes would lift these stones onto whisky barrels, with each stone being heavier than the last. In 1986, and largely thanks to the Scottish influence of some of its advisers, the World Strongest Man included the McGlashen stone event shown below. This was, in effect, the birth of Atlas Stone lifting in strongman and strongwoman.

For twelve years Atlas stones were known as McGlashen stones. This only changed at the 1998 World’s Strongest Man show in Morocco when the event was renamed the Atlas stone event as a nod to the ancient Greek God. So the Inver stone was not a literal atlas stone but, and it is an important caveat, it is an origin point.

But again, there is ANOTHER reason why I drove two hours happily. In 1979, and encouraged by strength historian David Webster, strongman Bill Kazmaier pressed the Inver Stone overhead in one of the most iconic strength photos of all time. ‘Kaz’, for those unfamiliar, was one of the most dominant strongmen of all time and, growing up, I loved nothing more than seeing a returning Kaz face off against Jón Páll Sigmarsson at the World Strongest Man. To put Kaz’s achievement into context, we are now nearly five decades after his press and only around a dozen other people have done the same.

 

So when I realized I would be in Scotland for work, the Inver Stone immediately came to mind. There was just one problem. Months earlier, also in Scotland, I discovered I was fairly crap at lifting round stones.

Train for shape, strength will follow.

Train for shape and the strength will follow is probably the most deep cut reference I will ever make. It was the motto of 1930s physical culturist Sig Klein who encouraged people to train for aesthetics and let strength come as a byproduct. In November 2025 I learned that I needed to train for shape, albeit, that shape was a round stone.

That month I spent a day driving around and lifting Scottish stones like the Dalwhinnie, Fianna, and Saddlin Mare among other wonderfully named objects. The Dalwhinnie, annoyingly, kicked my ass. It is just shy of 100kg, was also lifted by A.A. Cameron in the early 1900s, and is taken by many as a sort of practice stone to the Inver.

It caused me a LOT of trouble.

By this point I had been lifting stones for about two years in Ireland. Irish lifting stones, oddly, are generally quite forgiving… with forgiving being a very relative term here. They weigh anywhere from 99kg to 250 kg but many have edges, corners or rough surfaces that you can get your hand underneath. They have ‘handles’, wonderful protrusions that help you lift the damn thing. The Dalwhinnie did not. Instead it was round and smooth, more akin to an Atlas stone than an Irish one.

I could lift the thing from the ground but I couldn’t control it. Any advice I had about squeezing with my forearms was meaningless and as many a humbled lifter learns, strength training is highly specific. Eventually I cried uncle, tipped the Dalwhinnie onto one end, and bearhugged it to my chest.

That failure stayed with me because I knew the Inver was going to cause similar problems. So when I booked my trip to Scotland I engaged in a very carefully and well thought out system of taking heavy stones and lifting them in my back garden. Who says historians can’t be scientists?

The first stone I brought home was an 88kg lump of granite from a building site near my son’s Montessori. Over a small hill there lay several dozen of these rocks, dumped by the developer over a decade ago and, to my mind, entirely free to the general public. Taking one seemed an excellent idea until, climbing back over the hill with said rock against my chest, I bumped into another parent. I like to talk with the best of them but there was, and is, no dignified way to explain that sight. “Yes lovely weather isn’t it? No, I’m not stealing boulders, this particular boulder is broken and I’m simply bringing it back to the shop to be fixed.”

Parenthood is full of unexpected embarrassments and expectations. This one was intensified by the sight of my four-year-old carrying his own stone gleefully over the hill beside me.

Awkward conversation aside, the stone became a feature in our back garden, or an eye-sore depending on one’s disposition. It made for good practice but it was largely flat on one-side and hence, very easy to pick up. What I really needed was something smooth and horrible. Thankfully the west of Ireland provided. In May I drove to the other side of the island to lift the Liam O’Flaherty stone and, on the way back, I dropped by another stone for fun. There, at a pebble beach, I found a beautifully smooth stone, weighing somewhere from 100 to 110kg. I now finally had something without ‘handles’ that I could learn to clamp my forearms around.

Because I am a training idiot, I then went one step further and bought a second-hand 115kg Atlas stone which I decided I would lift without tacky.

It nearly killed me.

My first two weeks of the stone were straightforward. I would try to lift it, make a lot of grunting noises, and then get angry when it wouldn’t budge. At all. I convinced myself that I was engaging in ‘targeted isometrics’ rather than falling on my ass four times a week. A friend eventually recommended a Spud Atlas strap (basically something which helps you lap an Atlas stone), so I could do some controlled negatives. In layman’s terms this meant using a strap to lift the thing to my lap, throwing the strap aside, bearhugging the Atlas stone and slowly lowering it back to the ground while trying to desperately avoid crushing my feet.

Slowly, and stubbornly, it worked. I began to understand how to clamp a smooth object with my forearms and got more comfortable wrapping myself around a heavy stone. About a week before Scotland I began lifting the Atlas stone 3-4 inches from the ground. For the first time I began to feel confident about the Inver.

Outside of gym sessions I began obsessively looking at videos of people lifting the Inver on TikTok and Instagram, examining every possible angle and placement in case I needed to be creative on the day. I read, and reread, Martin Jancsics and Bill Crawford’s Stonelifting and repeatedly asked Martin for advice. To Martin’s credit, he is one of the most patient and enthusiastic stone lifters the community has. By anyone’s account my actions were overkill but I did not want to leave anything to chance.

The Inver Stone

So last Wednesday I flew to Scotland from Dublin, drove two hours in a rental car and got myself to the Inver stone. In my infinite stupidity I had decided to squat heavy that Monday so went into the day both stiff from travel, and tender from hamstring DOMs. Any sane person would have taken this as a reminder to warm up properly.

I did not, because I got too excited. And that is likely why my school does not let me teach the sport science students.

When I got to the Centre and saw the Inver with 265 lbs. carved into it I literally jumped out of the car and set myself up. Chalk? Check. Belt? Check. Gumshield to protect my award winning smile? Check!

With Martin’s last minute advice in my mind, I chalked up, put my arms around it and did a little pull from the ground. Immediately I knew the training had paid off. Without a second thought I pulled it to lap and then the barrel, completely worsening my hamstring DOMs but that was beside the point. Several months previously the Dalwhinnie stone stopped me. Now I had finally learned to create enough pressure to lift the Inver to the whisky barrel!

I was, dear reader, fucking delighted.

The video itself is anti-climactic. There was no huge struggle, or grunting. The stone popped up, my hamstrings told me there would be no more effort and I asked some nearby tourists to take a photo of my lowering the Inver off the barrel. In the Centre’s visitors centre, I signed into the record book, thought of June, David Webster, Martin and everyone else connected to the stone before writing down Conor Heffernan, Ireland, To Barrel.

I left with my complimentary drop of whisky.

Touching the Past

So, five days after the fact, what has stayed with me isn’t lifting 118kg onto a barrel. It is the story behind the weight.

As a historian, most of my working life is researching what is left over AFTER something happens. My research revolves around newspapers, photographs, magazines, books, reports and, if I’m lucky, letters or memoirs. I get little snippets of the past and have to work backwards to try my best to create a convincing explanation of what happened. Sometimes there is plenty of evidence, other times I’m left trying to read someone’s god-awful writing and convince myself my job is worthwhile.

Stone lifting is strange because the thing you are researching hasn’t gone anywhere. The Inver Stone I lifted is the same one Cameron is said to have lifted one hundred years previously. The same bit of granite is still there with all of the lifter’s stories and struggles etched into it. Kaz did not lift a stone like the Inver Stone in 1979. He lifted the Inver Stone. June Richard didn’t preserve the memory of the Inver Stone; she housed the thing in her garden for decades. She opened her doors to dozens and dozens of eager strength enthusiasts and, once successful, recorded their names into a book.

I love stone lifting partly because it is this weird world where history and activity smash into each other. I can’t lift the barbell that Arthur Saxon lifted one hundred years ago or the dumbbell that Sandow pushed overhead. What I can do is lift the stone that Kaz pressed into the air. This doesn’t mean that I believe every story I hear about a historic stone, and if anything, being a historian means I sometimes have to ask awkward questions. It does mean, however, that stones operate in a weird world between history and the present.

Stones also have a history that the archive cannot give you. I can read countless stories about the Inver being smooth and awkward or spend months squeezing a concrete ball to prepare myself. But, when I put my arms around the Inver, it is a completely different experience, and one that is felt first in my body and then in my mind.

None of this survives by records alone. June looked after the stone for forty-odd years. People wrote about it, videod it, travelled to it and failed or succeeded in breaking it from the ground. The stone moved from June’s cottage to Braemar but it is still being lifted and the book still has room for more signatures.

Now my name is in there too. Another tiny addition to the stone’s history. This is probably why the Inver got under my skin. For most of my time as a historian, I have to study strength feats from my desk. With the Inver, for a few seconds at least, my historical source was 118kg of granite that refused to budge.

Thankfully, after months of training, the bastard moved.