Eggs-citement all the way this Easter, Teesdale Mercury

Eggs-citement all the way this Easter

Mar 25, 2008

FORGET football, rugby or cricket, the one sport everyone should be playing this Easter weekend requires far more skill and athletic prowess.

The grand and ancient sport of egg rolling is also one of the few sports where you can eat the ball after the final whistle has blown. 

I had always thought the game died out along with tiddlywinks, pin the tail on the donkey and shove ha' penny, so I was delighted to spot an announcement on the back of Barningham Parish Magazine headlined "Come egg rolling on Easter Sunday".

Yes, the good people of the lower dale will be chucking eggs down a hill with aplomb at the weekend.  

I have fond personal memories of the sport. Each Easter, the family would gather at a hilltop near Cotherstone for the annual Braddy/Lee/Birkett egg rolling championship.

Were egg rolling an Olympic discipline - and let's face it, it should be - then I would nominate this particular hill to be an official venue for 2012.

It had it all. A good steep incline, plenty of lush, green grass, and numerous obstacles, in the form of fallen branches, mountainous molehills and ripe cowpats.

For those of you who have never ventured up a hill with a basket of hard-boileds before, the rules of egg rolling are deeply complex: You roll your egg down a hill. If it doesn't break, you win. It's a bit like golf, only without the clubs and the silly jumpers.

Oh, and it's cracking fun, a bit of a scramble etc etc.

I sincerely hope the egg rollers of Barningham are not the only ones in the dale keeping the noble sport of kings alive this Easter. If you've never tried 

it before, why not give it a roll over the Bank Holiday weekend.

OF course, egg rolling is not the greatest of all Easter sports. That title must surely go to the dinner table battle of wits - egg jarping. Unlike egg rolling I still engage in a spot of jarping to this day. Yet, despite its marvellous name, there is no place for jarping in the dictionary. 

Shockingly, our office Bloomsbury has nothing between ‘jarosite' and ‘jarrah' and Microsoft Word underlines every jarp with an annoying little red squiggle. For the uninitiated, jarping is a game of one-on-one combat. 

Competitors select a hard boiled egg, usually dyed brown with onion skins, and smack it against the egg held by the player sitting next to them. The egg that survives the joust wins that round and the process continues around the table. The winner is the holder of the last remaining good egg.

It's rather like conkers, only children can play it without safety goggles!

The secret to good jarping is egg selection. If you take part in a match this weekend, make sure to keep an eye out for those hairline cracks.

But what is the origin of jarping? After hours of extensive research (that's journalist speak for a quick look on Google) I discovered that the practice dates back centuries.

And, although the name differs, variations of the sport are found outside County Durham. 

Elsewhere in England, it is referred to as shackling or dumping. And, according to "An Egg at Easter: A Folklore Study", by Venetia Newall, the game is called ‘eierttikken' in Holland, ‘kippen' in Germany, ‘tutsanye' in the former Yugoslavia and ‘pigge paskeaeg' in Denmark.  And there are references to a similar pastime, called ‘w waletke', being played in Poland in the 15th century.

Most intriguing is the jarping variation played in parts of China, which involved eggs with cement cores. However, the government banned this eggs-treme (my apologies) version of the game several decades ago.

But what of the name ‘jarping' itself? It appears to be unique to the North East of England.

Some believe the origin is the old Scots/northern English word, ‘jaup' or ‘jawp', which means something like ‘splash'. 

Do any breaders have their own theories?

Whatever the meaning, jarping is surely the most fun you can have with salad, and I hope, one day, it is given its rightful place in the English dictionary.

First published in the Mercury, March 19, 2008