The World Gurning Championship, Egremont

To gurn, in the specific and highly competitive Cumbrian sense, is to pull the most grotesque facial expression you can manage while your head is framed inside a horse collar. The collar is called a braffin, a genuine working farm implement borrowed for the occasion, and it does one very specific job: it stops the audience seeing anything of a competitor’s face except the parts distorted enough to poke through the frame. Every September, in the small West Cumbrian town of Egremont, men, women, and children queue up to shove their heads through one of these collars and contort themselves into the ugliest shape their face allows, and a panel of judges — or, in some formats, crowd volume — decides a world champion. It is one of the strangest sporting titles in Britain, and one of the oldest, attached to a fair that has run in one form or another since 1267.

I’m writing this as a cultural read from Copenhagen rather than a ringside account — I haven’t queued up for a braffin myself, and this piece draws entirely on the public record of a genuinely well-documented, centuries-old fair rather than an invented scene. A contest this specific, and this funny, deserved the research regardless.

A fair seven and a half centuries deep

Egremont’s Crab Fair traces its first documented instance back to 1267, which makes it one of the older continuously referenced fairs in England, granted by charter and run in the town ever since in some form. The name has nothing to do with the shellfish; it refers to crab apples, traditionally thrown or distributed to the crowd as part of the fair’s original festivities, a detail that has mostly faded from the modern event while the fair itself has kept going.

Gurning’s specific attachment to the fair is genuinely old too — the earliest clear written references to competitive face-pulling at Egremont date to the mid-1800s, with an 1884 account describing entrants “grinning for bacca,” competing quite literally for a twist of tobacco as the prize. That detail matters, because it places gurning as a folk contest with real stakes, however small, rather than an ironic modern invention grafted onto an old fair for novelty value. People were pulling faces through a horse collar for a reward within living memory of Victorian Britain, long before anyone thought to call it a “world championship.”

Where the horse collar comes from

Nobody can state with total confidence why a horse collar specifically became gurning’s frame, and the folklore fills the gap the way it always does with competing stories that can’t be fully verified. One version holds that it grew from an old, unkind custom of crowning a village fool at the fair by dropping a horse collar over his head, the ugliest face on display becoming an object of ridicule rather than celebration. A cruder, more folkloric account has a drunken farmer coming home to a furious wife and bellowing at her to “stop gurning, woman,” before throwing the nearest horse collar over her head to shut her up. Neither story can be pinned to a specific date or a verifiable name, and I’d treat both as exactly what they are: colourful attempts to explain a custom whose real origin has been lost to time.

What can be said with more confidence is the practical logic of the collar once the custom existed regardless of how it started: a horse collar happened to be exactly the right shape and size to frame a human head at a farming fair where such things were lying around in quantity, the same unglamorous logic that gave the Scottish Highland Games their stones and hammers. Ordinary agricultural equipment, repurposed as sporting apparatus, because it was simply there.

Tommy Mattinson’s near-total dominance

If Egremont’s gurning championship has a modern face, it belongs to one man. Tommy Mattinson, from the nearby Cumbrian town of Aspatria, has built one of the most dominant records in any competitive discipline anywhere: nineteen championship wins across a career that started in the mid-1980s and has run, with interruptions, into the 2020s. His father Gordon won the title ten times before him, which makes gurning at Egremont, remarkably, a two-generation family dynasty — Tommy didn’t just compete at his father’s sport, he surpassed him and then kept winning for another decade and a half.

Guinness World Records recognises Mattinson’s tally as the most wins in the men’s competition, and the margin over the rest of the field is not close. A contest this small and this local rarely produces a figure with that kind of sustained, recognisable dominance — most niche championships turn over champions every few years as fresh talent arrives. Egremont has instead spent the better part of four decades with a single surname attached to the winner’s spot more often than not, which gives the whole event a strange kind of celebrity culture in miniature: locals genuinely know Tommy Mattinson’s face, or rather, know precisely how far that face can distort, the way a small town might know its best darts player or its most successful local boxer.

Three categories, one shared discipline

The modern championship runs men’s, women’s, and junior classes, each judged on the same basic criteria: how far the competitor can distort their features while framed in the braffin, judged by a panel watching for maximum grotesque effect rather than any single technical metric. There’s no stopwatch and no measuring tape the way there is in a discipline like the Highland Games’ stone put, where distance is an objective number. Gurning is judged the way a talent show is judged — by impression, by crowd reaction, by the judges’ collective sense of who pulled the most alarming face of the day. That subjectivity is part of the charm rather than a flaw; it keeps the event feeling like a genuine village fair contest rather than a sanitised, standardised sport.

The genre this belongs to

Egremont’s gurning championship sits in a small, specific tradition of British fairground contests that took something anyone could do for free — pull a silly face, roll a cheese down a hill, throw a stone — and built a rulebook and a reputation around it. It shares its DNA most directly with an event like the cheese rolling at Cooper’s Hill, another custom old enough that nobody can date its true beginning with certainty, kept alive by a community’s stubborn refusal to let a genuinely odd tradition lapse just because the modern world has plenty of tidier entertainment on offer.

What both events share, beyond the shared vintage, is the total absence of any commercial logic underpinning them. Nobody invented competitive face-pulling through a horse collar as a marketing exercise. It survived because a Cumbrian market town kept a 750-year-old fair going, and somewhere in that long run a group of people decided that the ugliest face deserved a prize, however small. The prize started as tobacco. It is a great deal more ceremonial now, but the impulse behind it hasn’t changed at all.

A dominance that finally paused

Even a record that dominant eventually meets its own limits. In 2025, Mattinson was unable to make the championship’s grand finale after falling ill, breaking a run of appearances that had defined the event for the better part of two generations. It is a small, human footnote to an otherwise remarkable streak, and it is worth including precisely because Encore doesn’t deal in tidy, uninterrupted legends — the public record shows a dominant career with a real gap in it, and that gap is part of the story too. Whether Mattinson returns to reclaim the title or a new name finally takes hold at Egremont, the fair itself will carry on regardless, the way it has carried on through every previous change of champion since the 1800s.

The Crab Fair around the gurning contest has always been bigger than the one event, in any case. Greasy pole climbing, a hound trail, and a procession through the town all still surround the day, a reminder that gurning is the fair’s most famous export rather than its entirety — the same way a festival’s headline slot gets remembered long after the smaller stages that filled the rest of the bill.

A face worth 750 years of fair

There is something quietly moving about a small town keeping a tradition this specific alive for this long, through wars, industrial decline, and every fashionable form of entertainment that has come and gone in the meantime. Egremont didn’t need gurning to survive as a market town, and gurning didn’t need Egremont specifically to exist as an idea — pulling a silly face is a universal human impulse that needs no fairground at all. But the two found each other centuries ago, framed by a horse collar that was never meant for this purpose, and the combination has outlasted almost everything else that was on offer at the fair in 1267. Tommy Mattinson’s face, distorted nineteen times over into a world championship, is really just the latest chapter of a joke Cumbria has been telling itself, patiently, for the better part of a millennium.