If you are free on Easter Monday and want to see something out of the ordinary, you should go along to Hallaton in Leicestershire to see the “bottle kicking”.

This strange old tradition involves a mass scrum of between 100 to 200 people on two teams from neighbouring villages trying to drag a small wooden beer barrel (the bottle) to one or other village boundary. This fast moving and sometimes slightly brutal contest involves fences, hedgerows and occasionally a few of the several thousand observers getting trampled underfoot whilst the game is played out across fields and streams.

To give you an idea of the action, the photos below are from the contest in 2007 when my brother got close up and personal with the players. I am not quite sure how he avoided getting either trampled or mistaken for an opponent – the guy in the 5th picture, for example, doesn’t quite seem sure of why a guy with a camera is running alonside him. Apart from some stunning pictures, I am pretty sure it was good training for occupations such as warzone photography given that some were taken whilst in the scrum itself.

Start of the Game – skinny chaps and shrinking violets need not apply :

In the scrum :

Getting personal :

It’s in there somewhere :

Run, run, run, camera? WTF? :

Scrums occasionally go straight through barbed wire fences :

The victorious team captain drinking beer from the bottle :

If you are free get yourself down there.