Six hundred years of liquorice history aren’t likely to be forgotten in a hurry. And rightly so. But in Pontefract they could soon have another history-maker in their midst, a World Cup-winning head coach.

He made his senior debut at seventeen for Huntingdon & District Rugby, and then would make debuts for Cambridge, Nottingham and Randwick before finally making his league entrance for Northampton Saints. Then, before many had even heard of George Furbank, he was playing for England, against France, in the Six Nations. No pressure.

For the final of the King’s Cup, Valladolid came alive with tens of thousands of rugby fans, celebrating their city’s utter dominance of the sport. Spain could not only compete at rugby, but maybe conquer it too. If only they had the chance.

A teammate, seeing yet another journalist waiting to speak to Adam Hastings, ponders aloud if he is “the only player that plays for Glasgow”. Dave Rennie, Warriors’ deadpan coach, wanders past, sipping a mug of piping-hot soup, and offers his own suggestion: “Make sure you kick him in the nuts!”

Amid tales of being among the founding fathers of football, rugby, the Barbarians, the Lions, of having Jack the Ripper as a member, and Dr Watson in the pack, to find out about the modern-day Blackheath, we go in search of a crook-catching Scottish wrestler.

It was pig iron and a man called Jeremiah Homfray that changed the fortunes of Ebbw Vale, transforming it from a sleepy farming community into a European giant of steel employing tens of thousands. Until it wasn’t. Now, the only Steelmen left in the valley can be found at Eugene Cross Park every other Saturday.

Prague suffered more than most during the Second World War. Invaded and occupied by the Nazis, it was bombed by Allied forces in an attempt to release Hitler’s stranglehold. But, as the war drew to a close, the RAF began to drop Red Cross supplies. Amid the medical and food parcels was one unique package of a rugby ball and four distinct black and amber jerseys. In less than a year, the finders had formed a rugby club and, 70 or so years later, the club made a pilgrimage to the original owners of those jerseys: Canterbury RFC.

As the German bombers flew overhead, the Moss Lane anti-aircraft guns burst into action, firing perhaps in hope rather than any certainty of hitting anything in the pitch-black night sky. Once the war was over, the station was dismantled but the weekly battles commenced, and, despite trials and tribulations, in the colours of St Helens RUFC and now Liverpool St Helens Football Club, they haven’t stopped since.

When Berkshire was a lawless place, the picturesque village of Sonning was a hideaway for the infamous outlaw Dick Turpin and his fabled steed Black Bess. Just under 300 years later, Rams RFC are attempting their own form of highway robbery by stealing the National One title from the rugby aristrocrats of Richmond.

Nine miles north of Leeds, just off the A660 to Otley, is an affluent village called Bramhope. Thousands fly overhead every week from Leeds-Bradford airport, heading to or from sunnier climes, rarely thinking what lies beneath. There’s nothing especially remarkable about this place of roughly 4,000 souls. Aside from the rugby that is. Specifically the local ladies rugby team, who have their sights set high, to be among the big guns of the Tyrells Premier 15s.

Southend RFC’s 150th anniversary is testament to many things. The commitment of volunteers down the generations, fiscal responsibility spanning two centuries, plus the resilience to ride out a pandemic or two. But most of all, it underlines that, in Essex, watching a joy-riding lion taking on a vertical ‘wall of death’ at 50mph isn’t as entertaining for the locals as a simple game of rugby.

He was supposed to be the epitome of a Bath man, finishing his rugby days in the club less than a mile from his home. But as he called bingo numbers in a town hall in France, helping an old lady win a telly, Dave Attwood knew things hadn’t quite gone to plan.

When Silvio Berlusconi’s empire finally began to crumble around him in 2011, The Economist magazine ran a headline which captured the zeitgeist. It read: ‘The man who screwed an entire country’. One of the few exceptions to that statement would be rugby in Amatori Milan, which thrived under his patronage in the 1990s. That is, unless he turned up to watch.

As he lay in the back of the ambulance, with his first concussion, the medics were concerned about Ben John’s nose: clearly broken, they thought. But it wasn’t: just a gift from his father’s side. The head though, that was the start of a different story altogether.

Around the corner from Jeff Stelling’s house, in a town famed for hanging a monkey dressed as a French sailor – a town that, ironically, 200 years later voted for a monkey as mayor – is a rugby side that’s lived quite the life. Almost a decade of being a Premiership yo-yo club, ended in four relegations. They lost their home, their coach, their players, their fans and came close to extinction. And yet, somehow, West Hartlepool are still with us.

In the car journey from Cardiff to Newcastle with team-mate Epi Taione, Vili Ma’asi broke down and couldn’t stop crying. He was 26 and had just said goodbye to Tonga for a professional rugby life. The only problem was, he didn’t have a club yet.

Amid the smoke-billowing industrial landscape of Port Talbot, where the core ingredients of steel are blasted at 1,200°C to produce five million tonnes of the hard stuff every year, a ‘mother’s boy’ called Richard Hibbard was kicked into shape.

In a town of one coffee shop and one pub in the South Island of New Zealand, the man with the greatest scrum brain on the planet is giving out advice to the rugby world. He used biomechanics, ballet dancers, and cage fighters to perfect the All Black scrum and now, at the request of forwards coaches the world over, Mike Cron is on Zoom. Listen up.

At 39, and after 115 England appearances, four Rugby World Cup campaigns and fourteen years playing for Darlington Mowden Park, Tamara Taylor felt she was being forced out of top-flight English rugby before her time. But then she fired up her Twitter account.

The tallest nation in the world, whose people fill Springbok halls of fame, are climbing the world rankings. Built on foundations laid by a chicken farmer from Botswana, the Netherlands have rebuilt their pathway and paved it with quality players of orange, including a boy named Wolf.