Marunde Muscle
17Entries
05Sections
12Places named

Every entry is one object or one contest, with its place, its weight, and how well the story is documented.

A granite block with an iron ring set in it, lying on grass
Stones · Potarch, Aberdeenshire

The Dinnie Stones

Two granite blocks with iron rings, together roughly 332 kilograms, named for Donald Dinnie, who is said to have carried them across the bridge at Potarch in 1860 — a claim far better known than it is documented.

332 kg together Carry disputed Mass documented

A stone cannot be copied, so the stone itself is the unit — and most of the arguments are about which figures anybody bothered to write down.

One entry per object, or per contest. What it weighs, where it sits, what has to happen before a lift counts there, and whether the story behind it was written down at the time or has simply been repeated since. Documented and traditional sets out how that distinction is applied.

The heavy end of the register

Six of the seventeen entries, picked rather than listed out. Weights are in kilograms; two of these objects have no honest weight at all, and the row says so instead of rounding one up.

Mass
Object
Ground
What it measures
Record
332 kg
The Dinnie Stones
Two blocks, wrought-iron rings through iron staples
Potarch, Aberdeenshire
On the River Dee
Both rings clear of the ground at once, and how far they travel
Disputed
186 kg
The Húsafell Stone
Flat basalt, associated with the door of a goat pen
Húsafell, Iceland
Borgarfjörður
Distance carried around the wall of the pen; a lap is the unit
Documented
100–200 kg
The Atlas Stones
Cast concrete spheres to a graded set of masses
No fixed home
Competition equipment
Loaded to a platform at a set height, in series
Documented
~120 kg
The Inver Stone
Rounded granite with nothing to hold
Braemar, Aberdeenshire
Upper Deeside
Distance walked from a standing lift, paced on grass
Traditional
~16 kg
The girya, one pood
A market counterweight with a handle
Russian markets
Trade weight before training kit
Nothing. It is the unit the others came to be counted in
Unit
varies
The adjustable barbell
Plate-loaded, and therefore repeatable
York, Pennsylvania
And Philadelphia before it
A number, comparable in any room that owns the same plates
Documented
All seventeen entries in the register → Where modern weighings disagree, the figure here is rounded and the entry carries both.
Supported by

The names behind the register

Drawn to one scale, so the awkwardness shows

Outlines at one scale, bottom-aligned on a common ground line, with the width bracketed beneath each. Dimensions are approximate. Mass is only half the argument; the other half is where a pair of hands can go.

Dinnie, larger block
188 kg · about 65 cm long
Húsafell slab
186 kg · about 110 cm tall
Basque cylinder
100–250 kg · about 60 cm tall
Girya, two pood
32.7 kg · about 30 cm tall
Atlas Stone, cast
100–200 kg · about 52 cm across

Read these two first

Browse every entry
A man and woman deadlift a loaded barbell together in a mountain-view gym
Broken from the ground, held, locked out or carried: four different verdicts available on the same effort.Photo: Anastasia Shuraeva / Pexels
Measure

What counts as a lift

Locked out, held, carried, or simply broken from the ground — every tradition draws the line somewhere different.

Pipers and drummers in kilts march across a grassy field at a highland games
The caber is scored on direction — twelve o'clock, away from the thrower — not on distance.Photo: Balloch Highland Games in front of the Castle - geograph.org.uk - 7362571 · Wikimedia Commons
Games

The Highland Games

Caber, hammer and weight over bar — events judged on control and direction rather than distance alone.

Ground · where the objects are

Three regions carry almost the whole register

Deeside in Aberdeenshire, the west of Iceland, and the Basque provinces either side of the western Pyrenees. Each object is filed under the place it sits in, because a stone that has not moved is the only kind that can be attempted twice on the same terms.

The Ground section →
PotarchPotarchAberdeenshireAberdeenshireHúsafellHúsafellBraemarBraemarInverInverZumarragaZumarraga
Deeside, Aberdeenshire, Scotland
PotarchPotarchAberdeenshireAberdeenshireHúsafellHúsafellBraemarBraemarInverInverZumarragaZumarraga
Borgarfjörður, western Iceland
PotarchPotarchAberdeenshireAberdeenshireHúsafellHúsafellBraemarBraemarInverInverZumarragaZumarraga
Gipuzkoa, Basque Country, northern Spain
Three locator maps rather than one, because the ground is spread across a third of Europe. Each panel is a close crop, and the small key in its corner shows where that crop sits in north-west Europe. Potarch is the crossing on the River Dee where the Dinnie Stones are kept, with Braemar upstream of it; Húsafell is a farm in the west of Iceland; Zumarraga stands for the Basque stone-lifting country inland of San Sebastián.
Supported by

Five more supporters

Where everything is filed

Seventeen entries between them
Section 01 · 4 entries

Ground

Where the stones actually are.
Section 02 · 4 entries

Stones

The named ones.
Section 03 · 3 entries

Measure

What counts as a lift.
Section 04 · 3 entries

Games

Contests with rules.
Section 05 · 3 entries

Iron

When equipment replaced geology.
On keeping figures straight

Hardly anyone lifts the Dinnie Stones. That is not a problem for them: a measure does not need to be met, it needs to still be there tomorrow.

Which is the argument this whole register rests on. How each figure here was arrived at — weighed, witnessed, or only repeated — is set out in about the site, and tested against one object in The Dinnie Stones.