Kirkwall Ba

Being stuck on a bitterly cold, near-barren island in the North Atlantic can do strange things to people and they often resort to some bizarre behaviours in a bid to pass the time.

The inhabitants of Kirkwall, an island town in Scotland’s Orkney, have been particularly afflicted.

They have been enthusiastically diving into one of the world’s most physically demanding sports, Kirkwall Ba, on an annual basis since at least the mid-1600’s. However, most Orcadians reckon ba' first arose 220 years earlier when a Kirkwall leader decapitated a local tyrant and the community punted his head around the streets of the town.

In the current version played every year, the town’s men folk are split between the ‘Doonies’ and the ‘Uppies’. A small leather ball is thrown between a scrum made up of the two teams, several hundred men strong, and the Doonies try to push the ball into the sea while the Uppies try to get it to a wall one mile up the town.

There are few restrictions on what is permitted by the teams in their furious bid to get the ba' to where it needs to go and they frequently end up knocking seven shades out of each other. The uniform is basic – a rugby shirt and a pair of steel toe boots. For booting and what have you.

The game is part of a family of ball sports played across Scotland and elsewhere in the UK. Many involve kicking the ball and shockingly, they are credited with being the forerunner of the beautiful game. There is, however, little beautiful about the cartoon-like cloud of humanity that tumbles from one end of the town to the other seemingly at random.

Once the ball is thrown into the scrum it normally disappears for a period before suddenly emerging, tucked under the jumper of a wild-eyed participant who then bolts up (or doon) the road in their chosen direction. However, it is normally a matter of moments before he is intercepted – and buried under several ton of flailing, furious Orkney Islanders.

So there you have it. The game that Pele, Maradona, Best and Messi brought to a beautiful pinnacle started with a mob of ruddy-checked Orkney Islander’s steel-toe booting the decapitated head of a local tyrant around the town for the craic.