Pick your plaid. Wear your kilt. And bring your appetite for sheep intestines.

The Rhode Island Scottish Highland Festival is this weekend in Richmond. The event, which draws 3,000 people and is in its 10th year, is all things Scottish: music, dance and food. Athletic competition also plays a big part, ranging from the serious — throwing stones and tree trunks — to the not-so-serious: hurling haggis and rolling pins.

“Most of the things we do in the festival are based on things they did in Scotland in ages past,” says Marcia Hays, co-chairperson of the festival. “Some are just for fun.”

For the record, hurling haggis has a long, rich tradition in Scotland. For that matter, so does playing bagpipes.

“You’ll hear bagpipes everywhere you go,” Hays says. “You’ll have vendors and a clan village with all the different clans of Scottish ancestry.”

There will be soloist and band bagpiping competitions, and a snare drum competition, too. There will be demonstrations on making kilts and playing harp. There will be Clydesdales and border collies, activities for children and stage music performances for everyone.

“A lot of what Scots do at Highland games is tradition,” says Bill Hays, husband of Marcia Hays and the former president of the Scottish Heritage Society in Rhode Island. “The major reason for starting the games was for the clan chiefs to exercise their people without going into battle and killing each other.”

Death brought life to Scottish festivals. A few decades after the calamitous Battle of Culloden in 1746, where Highland Scots were crushed and their traditions then suppressed by the British, the festivals and games began.

“The Scots brought back their national dances and music,” says Marcia Hays. “The festivals we have in the United States are basically the same as the ones in Scotland.”

The Rhode Island festival is the first of a dozen Highland festivals in New England, the last of which is in October in Connecticut, in the aptly named town of Scotland. While each festival has its own competition, points accumulated over all the festivals determine the New England champion.

The athletic competitions are the main attraction.

“The competitions are inspired by war and agriculture,” says Bill Hays.

The sheaf toss, essentially throwing a pillow case stuffed with straw over a progressively raised bar, mimics bailing hay. The stone put, heaving a rock weighing between 16 and 22 pounds, honors plowing. “If you’re clearing a field, you have to pick up stones and toss them to the edge,” Bill Hays says.

Similarly, the caber, a 150-pound, 20-foot-long trimmed tree trunk, is tossed as a lumberjack would have sent timber into a river, or as a soldier would have bridged a defense. “You could toss a caber across a moat,” Bill Hays says. “You could toss a caber against a castle wall and climb up it.”

Competitors are encouraged to wear kilts. “The first time men where kilts they are self-conscious,” Marcia Hays says. “But after a while, it becomes natural.”

However, given the twirling that competitors will undertake, going completely “natural” with kilts, while historically accurate, would be considered in poor taste at a family festival.

“Most of the regiments in Scotland had a command, ‘Off with your kilts,’ ” Bill Hays says. “They’d inspect to see if you were wearing anything underneath. If you were, there was a punishment. The reason is that in battle, underwear is an impediment. It gets in the way. If you have to go, you go.”

(The all-day festival, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, takes place not on a battlefield, but a fairgrounds. So there will be portable toilets.)

While the festival features so-called “heavy athletics,” it also offers “light athletics.” All are variations on a theme: tossing things. This includes a Wellington boot, a rolling pin and 1.5 pounds of haggis in a bag.

“Some festivals use real haggis,” says Hazel Douthitt, chairwoman of the festival’s light athletics. “But some of us Scots are more Scottish than others and we don’t want to waste food.”

The Rhode Island festival’s haggis hurl does not involve seasoned sheep intestines cooked in a sheep’s stomach. It involves a manmade material of similar consistency.

“A lot of people have to throw this thing,” Douthitt says. “So it has to be quite durable.”

Playing with your food is one thing; tossing it around is another, which if Scottish lore is truly rooted in reality, began centuries ago.

“The story is women would go down to the river and toss lunch to their men on the other side,” Douthitt says.

To do this, apparently women would stand on a rock at the river’s edge. At the festival, it’s a barrel. And tradition suggests that before the haggis is hurled (underhand by the rules), the women would improve their grip on the sheep guts by patting their hands in peat. “Very few of the ladies rub their hands in the peat. It doesn’t have a pleasant odor. But it’s there.”

The rolling pin and Wellington boot tosses are not steeped in Scottish tradition. “We do that just for fun, yucks and giggles.”

Festival visitors are welcome to compete in the athletics, or just watch. The same goes for dance. There is social dance, called country dancing. “It’s like square dancing,” says Janet Allen, chairwoman of dance at the festival. “With a little instruction, people can do that.”

There’s also competitive Highland dance, which is done individually by men and women, although historically it was only done by men. “It’s very athletic. There is a lot of jumping and a lot of movement,” Allen says. There are different kinds of Highland dance, one to celebrate a military victory, another to help bring that about by recruiting soldiers.

“Each dance presents something different.”

At the festival you can buy Scottish clothing and eat Scottish food: fish and chips, shortbread, birdies (meat pastries or pies) and, of course, haggis.

“It can have a very strong liver taste, and a lot of people don’t like liver,” says Marcia Hays. “You’ve got to like liver if you’re going to be eating haggis.”

Otherwise, try hurling it.

The 10th annual Rhode Island Scottish Highland Festival is Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the Washington County Fairgrounds off Route 112 in Richmond. Admission is $12, $10 for seniors, $5 for children 6-12, and free for those younger. For more information, visit www.riscot.org.

brourke@projo.com