Bolton has the oldest football ground in the country

8:19am Tuesday 8th May 2007

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THE oldest football ground in the world still in use today is in the tiny village of Chapeltown in Turton.

But the pitch where the modern game began is nearly 50 years older than previously believed.

New research has found that the pitch, the birthplace of Turton FC, first staged a football match as early as 1830.

Turton are the oldest football club in the North-west and are recognised as being the first to introduce the modern "no hands" game in Lancashire.

The club was formed in 1871 and official football history dates the beginning of the modern game in that era. Turton are also accredited with teaching the modern rules of the game to the embryonic Bolton Wanderers Football Club.

Bolton academic Peter Swain - a part-time lecturer at the University of Bolton - is carrying out research which he believes will enable him to re-write the official history of football in the North-west.

Turton no longer play at the ground, which is off High Street, and has been the home of Lancashire Amateur League side Old Boltonians since 1952. One of the first local clubs to re-organise after the Second World War, Old Boltonians bought the land in 1970.

Mr Swain has unearthed an article in the Darwen News newspaper of March 9, 1878, which is an interview with the participants in a match on the ground between Tottington and Darwen 48 years previously, on the Monday before Shrove Tuesday.

The stakes of the game were £2 10 shillings a side and lodged with the Round Barn public house between Edgworth and Darwen.

"The Tottington team was made up of players from Bolton, Bury and Turton, but there were five back lyers', two side players', 13 in players' and one trundler in' per side, with no umpire or referee.

"They lined up in a straight line about two yards apart.

"The ball was trundled in between them and then they started their football match. A line was drawn 15 yards from the fence at each end of the field, the space between the line and the fence was the equivalent of the goal.

"This was a variety of what was known as folk football. There are instances of it now around the British Isles, usually taking place on a Shrove Tuesday."

One of the men who played for Tottington was Ben Hart from Bolton. According to Mr Swain, Hart was a professional runner who later became a publican in Bolton, but he was very well known as an athlete. Unfortunately, Hart was on the losing side as Darwen emerged 3-0 winners.

Mr Swain went on: "These were not professional sides as we know them today, but there was always money put up for the teams, usually held by a landlord for the winner.

"I've got reports from other sources that Ben Hart organised games of football at a time when official history says that football was dead - it didn't exist. So this contradicts the official account of football.

"In fact the official history gives the impression that football was brought back to the working class by the middle class. But this is not the case.

"Football was played through the centuries as folk football, usually on Shrove Tuesday, usually with mass games in the streets, so there might be 1,000 or 500 a side.

"Games would last all day and official history tells us that these games died out in the 1830s and 1840s. As towns and cities industrialised and urbanised, the middle classes did not want mass games of football interfering with commerce and profit.

"Lots of bye-laws were passed to ban football and that happened in Bolton in 1841.

"Once football had died, the argument is that it was re-introduced via the public schools.

"But I have now started to unearth reports of games played throughout Bolton in the 1830s. Games were taking place in Bolton on fields with an agreed number of players - it might be 20-a-side. The team who won would get paid, or they might play for a pig or another prize.

"The idea that football had finished - it might have finished as a street game - is wrong."

Mr Swain is also completing a doctorate at the university on amateur football and social class between 1870 and 1914.

His only regret is that Turton - for whom Mr Swain played for up to 10 years ending in the 1970s - do not own the football pitch any more.

"It's a shame that Turton struggled to find a pitch in their own village after reforming. Turton are a team steeped in history, but they now play on a pitch near the new estate near the Barlow Institute."