No Pie, No Priest: A Journey through the Folk Sports of Britain

Writer Harry Pearson takes a warm and witty journey around Britain in  pursuit of the lost folk sports that somehow still linger on in the  glitzy era of the Premier League and Sky Sports to find out how and why  they have survived and to meet the characters who keep them going.

 When Victorian public schoolmasters and Oxbridge-educated gentlemen  were taming football, codifying cricket, bringing the values of muscular  Christianity to the boxing ring and the athletics field, games that  dated back to the pagan era clung on in isolated pockets of rural  Britain, unmodified by contemporary tastes, shunned by the media and  sport’s ruling elites.

Here they remain, small, secret worlds,  free from media scrutiny and VAR controversies, wreathed in an arcane  language of face-gaters, whack-ups, potties, gates-of-hell and the  Dorset flop; as much a part of the British countryside as the natterjack  toad and almost as endangered. No Pie, No Priest! travels through  Britain in search of the nation’s traditional rural sports, seeking out  the championship of Knur and Spell (a Viking forefather of golf) on the  West Yorkshire moors; watching Irish Road Bowling in County Armagh (once  a surprising interest of England cricket captain Mike Brearley),  Popinjay at Kilwinning Abbey in Ayrshire, the Aunt Sally competitions of  Oxfordshire, and taking in world championship Stoolball (often  considered the dairymaid’s form of cricket) and Toad-in-the-Hole in West  Sussex.

No Pie, No Priest! combines sports reporting, travelogue  and history, and features a cast of bucolic eccentrics and many deeply  impenetrable regional accents.