The World Gurning Championship, Egremont

Sat, 21 Sep 2019 11:02:00 +0000

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.

Egremont - vo.rs

The World Gurning Championship, Egremont