Hailes or clacken is a Scottish ball game which dates to the 18th century and achieved its widest popularity in the nineteenth. It has now virtually died out, replaced by football, except at The Edinburgh Academy, where an exhibition match is played annually. The game is similar to shinty but played with wooden bats known as clackens.

The clacken, or clackan, is described in the Scottish National Dictionary as "a wooden hand-bat or racquet used by boys at The Edinburgh Academy and Royal High School". It is derived from the Scots word cleckinbrod, derived in turn from brod, a board and the onomatopoeic word cleck or clack, the noise made by the clapper in a mill. In August 1821, Blackwood's Magazine carried an article about traditional games: "The games among the children of Edinburgh have their periodic returns. At one time nothing is to be seen in the hands of boys but cleckenbrods."

The picture on the right, which appeared as the frontispiece to an 1829 edition of Walter Scott's Tales of a Grandfather shows Scott's grandson, John Hugh Lockhart with a clacken and ball at Abbotsford. This is probably the oldest representation of the clacken.

The design of the clacken, as described in the Encyclopaedia of Sport in 1898 as "a piece of wood about 18 inches long and has a head about 4 inches wide and ½ inch thick; just short of the head, the bat is thinned down to about ¼ inch from back to front, and again the head is thinned off towards the tip to make it easier to raise the ball from the ground."

The clacken was used in the game of Hailes, though it had other uses. "All would be armed with clackans, wooden bats suitable for playing shinty, or hails or hitting other boys' heads" (from E. S. Haldane's Scotland of our Fathers, 1933). In recent years it survives only at the Edinburgh Academy, where it is used in an annual Hailes match of the Ephors versus the Leavers (or non-Ephors) and in athletics where they run a clacken-and-ball race. Until the 1960s, it was still used in the Junior School for playing Hailes and also in the Senior School by the Ephors as a means of delivering corporal punishment.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, hails referred to the goals in several varieties of hand- and football. Games such as hail-ba' and hand' an' hail were played in various parts of Scotland. The latter was a game common in Dumfriesshire. According to Jamieson, "two hails, or dules, are fixed on, at about the distance of four hundred yards from each other, or as much farther as the players can agree on. The two parties then place themselves in the middle between the two goals, or dules, and one of the persons, taking a soft elastic ball about the size of a man's fist, tosses it into the air and as it falls strikes it with his palm towards his antagonists. The object of the game is for either party to drive the ball beyond the goal which lies before them, while their opponents do all in their power to prevent this."

In his poems of 1804, W. Tarras tells in verse of such a game:

and