Countdown to Shrovetide 2025 has begun and the two dedicated Shrovetiders who have received the town's highest honour of launching the Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide balls as painted by Tim and Simon (pictured) on 4th & 5th March 2025 are:
Shrove Tuesday Farmer Dave Bott who was born in an Ashbourne maternity home and has lived the area all of his life will Turn the Ball Up.
He has served on the summer league committee for 40 years, holding the positions of vice chairman or chairman for 15 of those years. Additionally, he has been the vice chairman and chairman of the British Holstein region for West Derbyshire for three years each, and he also chairs the village hall committee in his local community. Furthermore, he is the president of the Ashbourne Young Farmers Club.
Dave has said Turning the Ball up is Ashbourne’s equivalent to a knighthood.
Ash Wednesday it will be Brian Pegg who will throw the ball into the crowd.
Brian and his brother Trevor own the land which is home to the Upards goal and means for the last 40 years the farmer has had the best view of the action.
The Farmer from Sturston remembers watching his dad be a turner-up in 2005. He said now twenty years later being asked to do the same it kind of all came together and means it’s a nice time to do it.”
Probably the best known of the 15 remaining Festival Football games played in Britain, the game at Ashbourne is takes place throughout the streets each year on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. The boundary between the two teams, Upards and Downards, is the Scolebrook/Henmore Brook.
The Royal Shrovetide Football Match occurs annually on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday in the town of Ashbourne.
Ashbourne’s Royal Shrovetide Football game is played between the Up’ards, traditionally those from north of the Henmore brook, and the Down’ards, from south of the river. The game starts at the turn-up plinth in the Shaw Croft car park and is played throughout the streets, jitties (alleyways), in the park pond and across fields with 3 miles separating the goals: Sturston Mill for the Up’ards and Clifton Mill for the Down’ards. Traditionally, the goals were scored by entering the wheel house and tapping the ball 3 times against the mill wheel. Since both mills are now demolished, purpose-built stone plinths were erected to represent the mill wheel. The ball is still tapped 3 times but now against the mill stone in the centre of the plinth by a player standing in the river.
Not quite as lawless as its reputation, the game has only a few rules and play is not allowed in gardens, the Churchyard or the Town’s Memorial Gardens, but most of the shops still board up their windows. The game starts at 2pm each day, and re-starts if a goal is scored before 5pm with the game ending at 10pm or at the time of the ball being scored after 5pm. Although mainly a game of “hug”, where the ball is carried around in a large group of players, the ball is quite often in the air where it can be seen by spectators, and there are occasional breakaways. One the most popular origin theories suggests that the game started in Saxon times with the macabre notion that the 'ball' was originally a severed head of a defeated enemy, which was tossed into the waiting crowd, but there is no real evidence supporting this theory.
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