The Pain and Pride of Britain’s Wildest Ballgame

Every Shrove Tuesday, the entire town of Ashbourne erupts in a brutal football match where almost anything goes and the rare glory of scoring a goal is savored for generations.

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“Long to reign over us, God save the Queen,” chants a choir of thousands on a patch of the English Midlands, their eyes fixated on a single podium. There’s a roar of applause, a wave of sound loud enough to ripple through the streets as cold breath hangs in the air. Then, silence, a fleeting moment that seems to last two lifetimes before a ball is thrown skyward and falls to grasping hands. The pagan game of Shrovetide has begun.

For 363 days of the year Ashbourne, Derbyshire, is just another town, a gatekeeper to the Peak District. It has a population slightly over 8,000 with a pub named after a duke or a dragon on near enough every corner, emblazoned with Union Jack flags. It’s a place where pensioners spend their golden years gazing through coffee shop windows at elaborately garnished cakes, buying Sunday roasts from butchers named Nigel’s or Mark’s — not the typical High Street chains. But for two days in late winter, locals take to the streets of Ashbourne when the town becomes a living folklore. It’s called Shrovetide football, and few things compare to it.

Game balls centuries old and passed down through the generations adorn fireplaces and hang from the ceiling of local pubs. But the game is changing. Today, the vast majority of people witness Shrovetide through video clips on five-inch screens, a distorted view that condenses the two days into montages of bloodied noses and battered bodies.

Each year photos of grimaced faces and thrown elbows are splashed across newspaper pages, as Shrovetide is paraded as a brutish game watched by goading spectators, like the main event in a Roman coliseum or a NASCAR race when each person is impatiently waiting for someone to crash in the most chaotic way possible. The true meaning of the game — a two-day revel for a town that would otherwise be just like every other — is lost. Towns like Ashbourne are reduced to a middle England stereotype — the swath of the country that never recovered from the mid-80’s mining strike, whose portrayal in the media is a shallow parody.
















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