Photos: Villages battle it out for the Hallaton Bottle Kicking game

This is ridiculous. I'm a middle-aged man in glasses crawling through a hawthorn hedge with barbed wire both sides, in a very muddy field near Hallaton.
All pictures by Andrew CarpenterAll pictures by Andrew Carpenter
All pictures by Andrew Carpenter

I'm trying to keep up with an epic, rampaging Hallaton Bottle Kicking game which had everything - the longest end anyone could remember, the shortest one ever and a woman getting stuck in with an umbrella.