anyone played Knur and Spell?

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thetyreman

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I first heard Brian Blessed talking about this weird game miners used to play, thought he was just joking looked it up and it looked quite interesting, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvCR8SxGzrc

I wonder if anyone still makes the bats they used using traditional methods? thought it would interest some on here,

cheers,

Ben.
 
Never heard of it.
My father, who grew up in Yorkshire, used to play a game he called "Peggy", IIRC.
You took a short stick, chopped off the ends at an angle, to make a shape somewhat like those erasers you used to get, a wide parallelogram, if you like.
You'd sit this "peg" on a tree stump or rock, carefully whack one end with a long stick, so that it flipped up into the air, and then bat it as far as you could while it was airborne, using the same long stick.
There might have been more to it than that, but it was a long time ago...
 
There are some designs in Mike Abbot's book Green Woodworking for a device to launch a ball to be hit, not as sophisticated as knurr and Spell, but he refers to it as trap ball.
In Herefordshire Tip-cat was a popular pub game, a turned wooden bicone shape was placed on a board, the end hit with a stick to launch it and then hit to see how far it would go.
 
It doesn't involve a stick (well, it's not supposed to involve a stick), but Hurling is a popular ball game in some parts of Cornwall.
1968:[youtube]Zpr8l_sGYZI[/youtube]
2018:[youtube]QSGhNey5nD4[/youtube]

I know it's normal to say that things aren't how they used to be, but these millennial boys don't get stuck in the way they used to. Poor show.

(Irish hurling does involve sticks, but is played on a pitch and is generally slightly more civilized)
 
My dad once told me that when he was a young lad (which would be around 1930), large crowds of people would meet up to watch clandestine games of knur and spell. Dates and venues were kept secret because lots of illegal betting went on. The place he lived at Parkwood Springs in Sheffield was ideal because it only had one access road, which made it easy to keep an eye out for the arrival of any police.
 
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