"On a June weekend, Bromyard's market town fills with scarecrows on a Heroes or Villains theme, culminating in a Friday evening grand parade where schools, scouts and families wheel their creations through the streets to the town green for judging."
Bromyard Scarecrow Festival
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Contestants eat as many two-foot lengths of raw stinging nettle as they can in one hour at the Bottle Inn in Marshwood, while a separate competition crowns the grower of the longest nettle within ten miles of the pub."
World Stinging Nettle Eating Championship
✦ Weird & Wonderful"A Lincolnshire village vintage show with over 250 classic vehicles, a Lancaster Bomber flypast and the 19th World Egg Throwing Championships, where international teams hurl eggs for distance, accuracy and sheer spectacular mess."
Swaton Vintage Day and World Egg Throwing Championships
✦ Weird & Wonderful"On the last Sunday of June, the Yorkshire Dales village of Upperthong crowns a world champion welly boot thrower: the only official championship for this deeply Yorkshire sport, invented here with a maximum run-up of exactly 42 paces as specified by Douglas Adams."
World Welly Wanging Championship
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Hundreds of lovingly restored classic Minis gather on the Glenarm Castle estate in support of cancer care."
Norn Iron Classic Minis at Glenarm Castle
"The King's Swan Marker and Livery Companies row six traditional skiffs upstream from Sunbury to Abingdon over five days, counting and marking every mute swan on the Thames in a ceremony unchanged since the 12th century."
Royal Swan Upping
✦ Weird & Wonderful"In its 52nd year, the world's only toe wrestling championship returns to Ashbourne Market Place where barefoot competitors lock toes and try to pin each other's foot to the ground in a sport invented in 1974 and officially rejected by the International Olympic Committee."
World Toe Wrestling Championship
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Named for the spectral black dog that terrorised St Mary's Church in 1577, this brilliant folklore festival fills the town with art, parade, storytelling and a ritual burning of demons."
Black Shuck Festival
✦ Weird & Wonderful"At the Barley Mow pub in Bonsall village, hens race over a thirty-foot course in heats building to a grand final, watched by enthusiastic crowds who take this Derbyshire Peak District tradition with exactly the gravity it deserves."
Bonsall World Championship Hen Racing
✦ Weird & Wonderful"The village of Heather, Kings Award winner, goes cheerfully insane each August as gardens fill with hundreds of scarecrows depicting celebrities and topical characters, all competing for votes from the crowds who walk the trail with a guide booklet."
Heather Scarecrow Festival
✦ Weird & Wonderful"A three-day seaside spectacle in the tiny village of Seaview complete with a greasy pole over the sea, tug of war, swimming races, diving and a fireworks display over the Solent."
Seaview Village Regatta
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Competitors snorkel two lengths of a peat bog trench without conventional swimming strokes, in Britain's smallest town."
World Bog Snorkelling Championships
✦ Weird & Wonderful"An international event (which means people from Sheringham and further afield take part) on Cromer Pier, where crabbers compete to catch the greatest number and the largest specimen in two hours, with all crabs returned to the sea to wait for next year."
World Pier Crabbing Championships
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Every first September weekend, the hilltop village of Norland transforms via a self-guided trail through narrow lanes and gardens, with villagers creating hundreds of characters on this year's Sports, Leisure and Games theme, all raising money for local causes."
Norland Scarecrow Festival
✦ Weird & Wonderful"On Easdale Island, accessible only by foot ferry, competitors skim slates across a flooded quarry pool on the last Saturday of summer, in the world's only skimming championship held on a Scottish island with no cars and a population of around 60."
World Stone Skimming Championships
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Competitors lob black puddings underarm at a stack of Yorkshire puddings on a plinth, settling an old rivalry."
World Black Pudding Throwing Championships
✦ Weird & Wonderful"One of the earliest events of the Sussex bonfire season sends costumed societies and burning torches through a pretty Wealden village high street."
Mayfield Bonfire
✦ Weird & Wonderful"This small Wealden village keeps the old Sussex tradition alive with a torchlit procession, costumed marchers and a village bonfire and fireworks."
Northiam Bonfire
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Through October and into November, the medieval Rufford Old Hall fills its grounds with scarecrows on a pop stars and music legends theme, making it one of the grandest and longest-running Halloween-season scarecrow trails in England."
Rufford Old Hall Scarecrow Festival
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Six rival bonfire societies fill the narrow streets with blazing torches, burning crosses and exploding effigies in the wildest Fifth of November spectacle in the world."
Lewes Bonfire Night Celebrations
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Villagers ring the church bells discordantly to scare off evil then heave a one-tonne boulder over with crowbars to keep the Devil trapped beneath for another year."
Turning the Devil's Stone
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Locals shoulder flaming barrels of tar and carry them blazing through the seaside town centre in a fiery survival of an old Devon Bonfire Night custom."
Seaton Tar Barrels
✦ Weird & Wonderful"This Kent town builds an eleven metre satirical effigy of a chosen public figure each year and blows it sky high with gunpowder and flame."
Edenbridge Bonfire
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Visiting societies and burning torches process past the abbey where the Battle of Hastings was fought, ending with a roaring bonfire and fireworks."
Battle Bonfire
✦ Weird & Wonderful"A torchlit pageant winds through the medieval cobbled hilltop town before a blazing boat is consigned to the flames at The Salts."
Rye Bonfire Pageant
✦ Weird & Wonderful"A whole village rises before dawn for a Bonfire Breakfast and a guy competition before a torchlit procession winds to the recreation ground for grand fireworks."
Robertsbridge Bonfire
✦ Weird & Wonderful"The night before Christmas Eve, this impossibly pretty Cornish fishing village marks the legend of a man who braved winter storms alone to bring in a catch that saved the whole village from starvation, with lantern processions down harbour lanes and a vast stargazy pie whose fish heads gaze out through the pastry crust."
Tom Bawcock's Eve
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Mummers shrouded head to toe in newspaper strips are led by the Town Crier to perform an ancient sword-fight and resurrection play around the village."
Marshfield Paper Boys Mummers Play
✦ Weird & Wonderful"At midnight on Boxing Day, a mob of villagers paraders through Broughton in Northamptonshire banging tin cans, dustbin lids and any other available metal objects to drive away a witch who is said to have terrorised the village centuries ago, a custom so relentlessly noisy and purposeful that nothing else quite like it survives in England."
Broughton Tin Can Band
✦ Weird & Wonderful"At the stroke of midnight villagers light ten-foot tarred birch torches and parade them behind a pipe band before hurling the flames into the River Earn."
Comrie Flambeaux
✦ Weird & Wonderful"A beribboned horse's skull on a pole arrives at the ancient Old House inn to challenge drinkers to a sung Welsh rhyming duel before being let in."
Llangynwyd Mari Lwyd
✦ Weird & Wonderful"A 700-year-old Lincolnshire custom where a leather tube is wrestled by hundreds of villagers toward one of four pubs, preceded by a Fool being smoked over a fire and the Lord of the Hood making proclamations in the church."
Haxey Hood Game
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Lantern-lit crowds gather around the community orchard for an apple-blessing ceremony with Morris dancing, folk song and mulled scrumpy on a cold January night."
Stoke Gabriel Wassail
✦ Weird & Wonderful"By bonfire light a crowd toasts the oldest apple tree, fires guns to scare off evil spirits and pours cider over its roots at the Butchers Arms."
Carhampton Wassail
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Torch-bearing villagers process from orchard to orchard with pots and pans to wake the apple trees, ending with refreshments at the cricket club."
Whimple Wassail
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Up to a thousand torch-bearing guizers in Viking dress march through the dark and set a full-size longship galley ablaze."
Up Helly Aa
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Twice a year the entire town of Jedburgh divides into Uppies and Doonies to contest a football match with no fixed rules, no referee and no pitch boundaries through the streets and closes of the town, a tradition said to derive from the use of an English soldier's head after a medieval border battle."
Jedburgh Ba' Game
✦ Weird & Wonderful"On the feast of St Ia, the mayor of St Ives throws a silver ball from the church wall to a waiting crowd of children who then hurl it between themselves on the beach and through the town for the morning, the last survivor of a Cornish hurling tradition that once swept across the county and is now played annually in only two places."
St Ives Hurling of the Silver Ball
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Shrove Tuesday sees the entire village of St Columb Major divide into Townsmen and Countrymen for a traditional hurling match through the streets and out across the surrounding fields, played with a solid silver ball and no rules beyond the agreement that the ball must be carried across one of two sets of goals two miles apart."
St Columb Major Hurling the Silver Ball
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Competitors race uphill carrying a hundredweight sack of coal to the village maypole every Easter Monday."
World Coal Carrying Championships
✦ Weird & Wonderful"Dozens of competitors hurl themselves down a near-vertical Cotswold hillside chasing a 7lb Double Gloucester cheese, a tradition that has drawn crowds to Brockworth every Spring Bank Holiday for centuries."
Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling and Wake