When a fifty-year-old Topsham printer went to Exeter to try and get a game of rugby, he was told he was too old for them. Undeterred, he opted to set up his own club, in a town known for building warships, fishing, and having an awful lot of pubs.
In the farming lands of north Norfolk, where Sirs Benjamin Britten and James Dyson went to school, in a town that was once burnt to cinders, a 91-year-old former boxer has found a home unlike any he’s ever known, at Holt RFC.
A meadow of bulls where a thousand years has seen two battles with the barbarians, the birth of Bram Stoker, and lots of rugby silverware. Welcome to the Parish. Welcome to Clontarf.
Two years after beating the All Blacks, the legendary 1971 British & Irish Lions decided to get together for one last hurrah. The men who’d faced down the haka now headed for Penryn, an ancient Cornish borough on a river where pirates once hid, men hauled granite and Spanish ships were sent fleeing by the townsfolk.
In the kind of town you’ve driven through a thousand times, Viking chiefs once roamed, a shop-keeping British & Irish Lion was raised, Russian KGB agents were snubbed and ‘the Wasps’ were given an almighty fright by the rugby kings of Cumbria.