Today, Monday the 18th of April 2022, the annual Bottle Kicking event saw thousands flock to a rural village just outside Rutland.

The Bottle Kicking takes place just over the boarder in Leicestershire, in the usually sleepy town of Hallaton, each Easter Monday.

Records of bottle-kicking date to the late 18th century, but the custom is thought to originate much earlier, from before the Christian era. 

Bottle-kicking has been an annual tradition for over 200 years. The tradition has been cancelled only three times in that time, in 2001 because of concerns over foot-and-mouth disease and subsequently during 2020 & 2021 due to Covid-19 restrictions. 

The bottles being paraded through Hallaton

The event starts with a parade through the villages of Medbourne and Hallaton. Locals carry a large hare pie and the three "bottles", which are actually small kegs or barrels. Two of the bottles are filled with beer. The third, called "the dummy", is made of solid wood and painted red and white. 

The pie is blessed by the Hallaton vicar before being cut apart and thrown to the crowd for the "scramble". The rest is placed in a sack to be carried up the nearby Hare Pie Hill. 

The bottles are then taken to the Buttercross (a conical structure with a sphere on top, used for keeping butter and cheese cool when the village was a market town) on the village green to be dressed with ribbons. Here, the penny loaves are distributed to the crowd.

Bagpipes playing in the unusual rural sport

There are virtually no rules to the bottle-kicking, except that there is no eye-gouging, no strangling, and no use of weapons. In the early afternoon, the hare pie is spread on the ground at a dip at the top of Hare Pie Bank, which is possibly the site of an ancient temple. Each bottle is then tossed in the air three times, signaling the start of the competition. Each team tries to move the bottles,on a best-of-three basis, across two streams one mile (1.6 km) apart, by any means possible.

Participants trying to move the bottle

The contest is a rough one, with teams fighting to move the bottles over such obstacles as ditches, hedges, and barbed wire. Broken bones are not unheard-of, and emergency services are generally on standby. 

After the game, participants and spectators return to the village. Those players who put in an especially good effort (for example, carrying a barrel across the goal stream or holding on to a barrel for quite some time) are helped up onto the top of the ten-foot-tall Buttercross, and the opened bottle is passed up for them to drink from before being passed around the crowd.

The crowds jostling to move the bottle

The festive day normally draws to a close with participants and spectators retiring to pub, in true midlands style.

How did you spend your Easter? Do you fancy trying your hand at this next year?