Some experts reckon football – a game widely understood to be English – was actually started by the Scots, after they discovered the first ever football pitch north of Hadrian’s wall
The groundbreaking claim was made this week (Image: BBC Scotland/YouTube)
Forget claims England created the beautiful game – boffins reckon football first originated in Scotland.
The groundbreaking claim was made this week after boffs uncovered the first ever football pitch in the country. Historian and sports archaeologist Ged O’Brien says he has found the first hallowed ground the game was ever played on – and it definitely is not in England.
Instead he claims to have discovered a 17th century football pitch in Kirkcudbrightshire county. And it predates England’s claim to have formally recognised the game by decades – and more than two centuries before the formation of the Football Association (FA). Mr O’Brien, the former president of the Association of Sports Historians, said his discovery will force those who believe modern football was invented in England to “rewrite everything they think they know”.
Dunblane (Scotland) Football club, 1889(Image: Public Domain)
He said the first clues emerged in a letter from the Reverend Samuel Rutherford, minister at Anwoth Old Kirk dated between 1627 and 1638. The letter reveals his dismay at finding parishioners playing ‘foot-ball’ on Sabbath afternoons at the nearby Mossrobin Farm.
Archaeologist Phil Richardson, of Archaeology Scotland, said: “This is the ancestor, the grandparent, of modern world football, and it’s Scottish.” The letters detail how Rev Rutherford tried to ban the games from being played and ordered a line of stones to be placed across the field.
Mr O’Brien and his team of archaeologists set out to find the stones – and discovered a line of 14 large rocks cutting across a flat area at the former Mossrobin farm. Tests of the soil beneath the stones suggest they were put there around the time of Rutherford’s order.
Historian and sports archaeologist Ged O’Brien (Image: BBC Scotland/YouTube)
Archaeologist Phil, who conducted the tests, said: ‘This backs up the story that a barrier was put across an open space.” He added that it proves the beautiful game was not started by posh institutions such as Eton, as first thought.
“The traditional view of modern football is that it started in 1863 with a group of ex-public schoolboys from places like Eton and Harrow,” he said. “Now, this is entirely and utterly mistaken because, for hundreds of years, the Scots have been regularly playing football in Anwoth and places like it.”