This text explores the place, meaning and content of Celtic sport: the place, passion and meaning of rugby in Wales; shinty in Scotland; and football in Brittany. It provides for an explanation of the links betweenn civic and ethnic nationalism in Irish sport, the role of the Gaelic Athletic Association in both Ireland and Scotland, and a critical evaluation of the part played by sport in political nationalism in France. The author seeks to explain why so many of the peripheral borderlands of Europe, struggling for elements of autonomy, tend to be pasionate about national and regional forms of sport.