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Sports historian Ged O’Brien and his team say this is the site of the world’s oldest football pitch, in Anworth, Kirkcudbrightshire - Saltire News and Sport
A sports historian behind the claims that Scotland invented football says he has found the world’s oldest known pitch there.
Ged O’Brien, who has campaigned for years for England to be stripped of its status as creator of the beautiful game, says new evidence backed by archaeology suggests the sport had been played on a farm north of the border around 400 years ago.
That would be more than 200 years before the formation of the Football Association in 1863.
O’Brien, a former president of the Association of Sports Historians and the founder of the Scottish Football Museum, says his discovery will force those who believe modern football was invented in England to “rewrite everything they think they know”.
It follows the emergence of evidence he says suggests the game was played in Anwoth, Kirkcudbrightshire, which he claims should now be recognised as “one of the cornerstones of the new world history of football”.
O’Brien, whose discovery is revealed on BBC Scotland’s A View From The Terrace on Friday night, says the first clues emerged in a letter from the Rev Samuel Rutherford, minister at Anwoth Old Kirk from 1627 to 1638 and later professor of divinity at St Andrews University.
The letter relates how the Presbyterian pastor arrived in the parish to discover “there was a piece of ground on Mossrobin farm where on Sabbath afternoon the people used to play at foot-ball”.
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O’Brien has made it his personal mission to disprove theories that England is the birthplace of the game - Saltire News and Sport
Discovery relates to proper football, not mob game
O’Brien, who has campaigned publicly since 2019 for Scotland to be recognised as the birthplace of football around 500 years earlier, said: “This is one of the most important sentences I have ever read in football history, because it specifically identifies the exact place the football pitch was.
“I have always thought football has been played in Scotland for hundreds of years. Not mob-football, but proper football. Of course it has always been very hard to prove it because working people never kept records.
“Rutherford is enraged by the fact his parishioners played football every Sunday, and so one day he heads out after doing his preaching to remonstrate with them and say that, ‘As the stones around him were his witness they were doing wrong’.”
Rutherford is said to have got the parishioners to move a line of stones across the pitch to stop them playing their weekly games.
O’Brien and a team of archaeologists who set out to find the stones discovered a line of 14 large rocks cutting across a flat area at the former Mossrobin farm.
Results of tests of the soil beneath the stones suggest they were put there around the time of Rutherford’s order.
Archaeologist Phil Richardson, of Archaeology Scotland, who conducted the tests, said: “This backs up the story that a barrier was put across an open space. It’s not about stock control, it’s not about agriculture or land boundaries and ownership.
“This is not a wall, it’s a temporary barrier to stop a particular event happening – in this case football.”
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Evidence suggests rocks were placed at the pitch site by parishioners to prevent locals from playing regular Sunday matches - Saltire News and Sport
History books ‘will need to be rewritten’
O’Brien, born in Southampton to Irish parents, said: “There are serious implications for historians because they are going to have to rewrite everything they think they know.
“In the history books, football is mob-football. It was chaos, people drunk, it’s anarchy. 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.
“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.
“Looking at the map, there are five tracks leading to the edge of this site. So, 400 years ago, everybody in a 10-mile radius knew where this was.
“If you’re playing football every Sunday of every year, you’ve got rules because you have to agree on rules. You couldn’t play violent football because you needed to work on Monday, so you’re thinking about your football, you’re playing regular football.
“This is the ancestor, the grandparent, of modern world football, and it’s Scottish.” Standing on the location of the ancient pitch, he added: “This is one of my great days ever, because we’re stood on the proof that we need to show that Scotland invented modern world football.
“In 1872, the minute international football started [with Scotland v England], Scottish clubs were absolutely destroying English teams. It’s absolutely no surprise because these people are 200 years in front of what England is doing.
“Anwoth is going to be one of the cornerstones of the new world history of football. This is a place that the locals specifically chose as a football pitch and I’ve got the evidence.
“It’s the start of the narrative that runs through to today because the game they played is the game everybody plays everywhere in the world.
“You can be up the side of a mountain in the Himalayas, watching a football game, and the ghosts of Anwoth will be watching.”
Ancient pitch resembles ‘natural amphitheatre’
Archaeologist Kieran Manchip, who assisted with the discovery, said: “You do get that sense of it being almost like a natural amphitheatre.
“Putting together all the sources, being here in the landscape and seeing how it all pieces together, all of those things corroborate with one another.”
A View from the Terrace is on BBC Scotland on Friday at 10.30pm.
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