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Shrovetide Football

3000 players and 1 rule: No Murder

Of all England’s sporting traditions, Derbyshire’s Shrovetide Football must undoubtedly be considered royalty. Every Shrove Tuesday and Mardi Gras Wednesday, the quiet town of Ashbourne splits into two teams: those born on the north side of the Henmore brooke and those born on the south side: the Up’ards against the Down’ards.

The game itself dates back over a thousand years and holds claim to the oldest running sporting rivalry on earth. Or so the locals say. The Victorians took it, adapted it and wrote rules and regulations to create modern day football. There are two goals, 3 miles apart and the object is to tap the ball 3 times against your own goal. You have 8 hours to do so. Apart from this there are no rules, save for murder. In fact only a few years back the oh-so-cunning Up’ards won by hooking up a fence to an electricity source, stopping the Down’ards in their tracks. With 3,000 people taking part what you witness can only be described as a mixture of football, rugby and American football, if it were played by a herd of marauding wildebeest.

But to those taking part it is the be-all and end-all. Those lucky enough to score have claimed the feeling was better than the day their child was born. The game is a passage to local greatness for the common man bored by the mundanity of everyday life. To fully understand this you have to stick around afterwards for the victory celebrations that would beat any World Cup trophy, and witness the deification of the goalscorer.

The teams are not just for two days a year, they are for life. If you are born an Up’ard, you remain always an Up’ard. You know your teammates not by the colour of their jersey but by their faces. They are family, friends and neighbours. In this way, perhaps ‘royalty’ is not an appropriate description, for the game has become a lasting remnant of traditional working class English rural life. It is incomprehensibly important to those involved, but if you let yourself succumb if only slightly to the Shrovetide fever, you will have rare access to the madness that is the English countryside.