Hallaton Bottle-Kicking Festival

Yesterday my friend Lizzie and I went to the annual Bottle-Kicking in the village of Hallaton, Leicestershire (see above for video of the 2008 event). The festival doesn't actually involve bottles, but small beer-filled kegs, the object being for either Hallaton, or the rival neighbouring village Medbourne, to get them - either by rolling, kicking or carrying, though "without eye-gouging or weapons" - into the streams that guard each village, in a tradition that is speculated to date back to pre-Christian times. Not entirely dissimilar to the Haxey Hood festival an hour or so up the A1 in Lincolnshire, it's a little like a game of medieval American football, or, as Clive Aslet describes it in his excellent book Villages Of Britain: "a cross between a rugby scrum and civil war". It begins with a procession carrying a hare pie (actually containing a special, chunkier, more indolent kind of hare known as "beef" in the modern version) through the village, and would seem to back up the rule, spoken by druids and mystics from time immemorial, that "any Anglo folklore custom that involves a hare will be, like, fucking awesome".

I don't think the photos below, snapped hurriedly on my phone, come anywhere near to conveying the excitement of the scrum at the centre of the game. It's impossible to get close-in to watch the action, without actually being involved in it, or owning a jet-pack. Also, as Lizzie, who grew up a couple of miles down the road, had warned me, the melee can suddenly, violently swing towards the watching crowd, sucking it up, and violently spitting it out: rarely a year goes by without a limb or two being broken. As the action began, younger, leatherier men than myself made breath-sucking, growling, macho Midlands noises that I hadn't heard since my Nottinghamshire school's Second Years boldly challenged the Third Years to a snowball fight in January, 1989. Every now and again, a shoe or trainer would fly up out of the scrum, high into the air.

"Sometimes people can't grab a barrel, so they grab someone's shoe. Sometimes they just throw their own shoe in the excitement of it," a grinning, toothy bald man standing next to me said, and, having just had my gripless suede loafers reheeled in Norwich for £19, I found myself taking another step back from the chaos. If you additionally take into account the fact that I was wearing bellbottoms and am going through a bit of a waistcoat phase at the moment, it could be said I wasn't exactly dressed for the occasion. I also haven't done anything approaching violent contact sport since the Sunday Times sent me to do a day's National Service for a feature in 2004. Nonetheless, as cheers went up, and the jumble of limbs careened towards me, I felt a primal instinct to roll up my flares, hand my phone and manbag to Lizzie, and pile in. "I am a hairy man!" I found myself thinking. "Built not dissimilarly to other hairy men since the dawn of time! Isn't it a little unnatural that it's over twenty years since I've inflicted even the most mild bit of bodily harm on one of my brethren?" That, and, as a Beano reader, I'd always wondered what it would be like to be actually inside one of those balls of dust with arms and limbs sticking out of them.

One surprising element to Hallaton's bottle-kicking day is just how many teenagers it attracts - much like another folklore festival I like to visit, The Straw Bear, in Whittlesey. These festivals are also an excuse for binge drinking of the most rustic kind. Unlike Whittlesey, however, one of whose sandwich shops during the 2002 festival was notable for selling non-specific "meat cobs", Hallaton is an extremely pretty collection of pubs and wisteria-strewn-cottages. This is just over the border from Rutland into Leicestershire: a part of the world where the chip shops look like branches of Fired Earth. It's not the kind of place you expect to see grown men bellowing, whilst gurning and tugging at one another. But here they were, on this magical, historical hill with its spooky, gnarly trees - a hill so majestic that ignoring its potential for folk ritual would be an act of ingratitude - and it could not have looked more curiously proper.