| Back to the previous photograph | |
|
| |
 Over the next few days, I will be seeing some of the oldest football clubs in the world so I thought it would be interesting to go right back to the early history and see how the game started. Ashbourne is one of about 50 towns and villages which had a tradition of "mob football" games during the middle ages. The games were all slightly different but generally involved people from each end of a town trying to get a ball to their end in order to score a point. There are a few places in Britain where such games are still played but Ashbourne is the only one where large numbers of people are involved. The game takes place on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday each year and involves enough people to completely fill this car park, although because it's a free-for-all with no set teams and no need to register to play, you can't actually tell who is just watching and who considers themself to be playing.  UTC Time: 09:14, Friday 14 August 2015 Local Time: 10:14, Friday 14 August 2015 Estimate of longitude: 1° 43' 47.71" W = -1.729920° Estimate of latitude: 53° 1' 3.07" N = 53.017520° Possible error on position estimate: 100 metres | |