The United Kingdom is home to eccentric traditions, and some of them have persisted through centuries, to the point that they became sports in our day and age. Most of the time, these traditions occur at least once a year in a particular location. Most of the time, it’s in small villages and towns (a lot of them, here in the West Midlands) that keep some of these traditions alive.
This article presents you with a short list of unusual “sports” that you’ll find in the UK. Some of them actually have competitors, and some of them have been created for sheer fun, out of respect for traditions. Of course, you won’t find any of these events on your traditional sports betting slip, but you might have a lot of fun if you ever witness one in our country.
Medieval Football
You might already know that the UK is the birthplace of modern football, and it is still the most popular sport to this day. The infrastructure surrounding the sport is totally different to when it first began its professional life in the late 1800s, let alone in its original Medieval form. For instance, now you can scour football betting options with Unibet. Rules of football as we know it have been created through centuries, and Medieval football is an umbrella term designing all forms of ball games that occurred during the middle-ages and forward.
One of the best examples of Medieval Football is the Royal Shrovetide Football game, which happens every year in Ashbourne, Derbyshire. Rules are simplistic: you have two teams composed of an unlimited number of participants and the mayor throws a football into the crowd. You have to tap the ball three times in a designated area to score a goal. Competitions happening nowadays are quite tame compared to what happened in the past. Indeed, one of the main rules of medieval football is not to kill anybody. Of course, nobody gets murdered in this kind of game anymore, but participating in medieval football is really not for the faint of the heart!
Cheese Rolling, Gloucestershire
What would you do for a good six pounds of locally produced UK cheese? Apparently, some people are willing to go the extra mile as competition occurs every year on top of a hill in a village in Gloucestershire. The goal of the race is to descend a very steep hill on foot as fast as you can.
The cheese rolling competition actually gets a fair bit of international press coverage, but we wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. Rolling down that hill is so dangerous that each year, many contestants end up with broken bones and other severe injuries.
Haxey Hood
Sometimes, you are better off watching sports on TV than playing the actual thing in the middle of a field. This would be especially true for the Haxey Hood, a very derivative form of Rugby that takes its roots from a 14th-century legend in North Lincolnshire.
The hood that serves as a rugby ball is in fact a large metal tube. The number of participants in a Haxey Hood game is unlimited, and each team is affiliated with one of the four pubs in the town. The goal is to get the hood at the door of one of these four pubs. Locals say that staying for ten minutes in the massive scrum will get you sore for more than two weeks.
