Gruesome British folk sports – from cheese-rolling to Hare Pie Scramble

‘Two mobs of men fighting over possession of a ball in a freezing, muddy river in Derbyshire,’ writes Harry Pearson, ‘is the British equivalent of the Rio Carnival.’ He’s not wrong. Brazil may have the sun, but we’ve got the capacity for mindless violence. It’s a trait expressed in many of the folk sports covered in this highly entertaining book.

The mass football games (such as the one in Ashbourne), which take place over pitches several miles long, aren’t quite as vicious as they once were. In a Georgian contest between the Men of Suffolk and the Men of Norfolk, nine players died. In Jedburgh, they used an Englishman’s severed head as the ball. Nevertheless, the modern contests are far from gentle. They remind Pearson of ‘those 1970s rugby union matches in which, if they’d removed the ball, the players would have carried on rucking in the mud without the slightest loss of focus or pleasure’.

At a shinty match in Scotland, Pearson is assured by a local that the sport is perfectly safe. At the exact moment he’s saying this, one of the players gets hit on the head by a stick, leaving ‘a gash above his eye that flapped like a second mouth’. The sound of the sticks colliding ‘sometimes attracts red deer stags who, mistaking it for the clashing antlers of their rivals-in-rut, turn up on the touchline, myopic with lust and searching for a fight’. Cumberland and Westmorland wrestlers would take this in their stride. One retired participant recalls away matches, and how returning home they’d keep an eye out for a field of cattle. ‘We’d get the coach driver to pull over and then we’d get in that field and have a competition to see who could topple a bullock the quickest.’