This month, Welston next the Sea hosted the County Tug of War Championships in the market square. On paper, it’s an event requiring two teams and a rope. In practice, an alarming quantity of mud was thrown in for good measure.

Teams competed by age and gender, but it was the novelty rounds that drew the crowds. The Custard Cream Feed saw anchors pulling backwards while a seated retiree dunked biscuits into tea and fed them, on pain of a point deduction should the biscuit collapse en route. Yarn Bomber June Pettifer, feeding for the Market Square team’s anchor Susan Crow, was twice caught sampling the goods herself before they reached Susan’s mouth. June’s defence: “quality control.”

Then came the mud flats, contested—as tradition now demands—in fancy dress, with bonus points on offer for the cleanest costume left standing. One six-person team arrived as bin-bag-and-tin-foil knights astride equally makeshift chargers. Two smaller “knights” piggybacked on two sturdier teammates dressed, with admirable commitment, as horses. Although a triumph of engineering, the mud, unimpressed by both chivalry and homemade armour, took the chargers’ footing from beneath them. Both pairs pitched forward in near-unison, and the tactical masterstroke became six fully mud-coated competitors indistinguishable from the flats themselves. They left in their wake, several square feet of tin foil, and a horse’s head.

Elsewhere, whispers of “ringers” trailed a formidable-looking Lanston women’s team. Investigation confirmed the accusation technically true and entirely legal: the team were indeed rugby players, all alumnae of the same school, several currently on the county’s Under-21s side. The protest was noted, filed, and—by unanimous consent of anyone who’d watched them pull—quietly withdrawn.

Welston did not retain the trophy this year. We did, however, retain our dignity, our biscuits and most of our footwear.