Earlier generations of Royal High Scholars had played their own schoolyard game, known as clacken from the wooden bat used by players, and as late as the 1880s 'no High School boy considered his equipment complete unless the wooden clacken hung to his wrist as he went and came', but the rise of national games, especially rugby, the grant of Holyrood Field for cricket in 1860, and the construction of a gymnasium and swimming bath in 1885, meant the ancient Royal High Schoolyard game was extinct by 1911.