Rugby Towns #5 Topsham RFC
When a fifty-year-old Topsham printer went to Exeter to try and get a game of rugby, he was told he was too old for them. Undeterred, he opted to set up his own club, in a town known for building warships, fishing, and having an awful lot of pubs.
Rugby Towns #4 Holt RFC
In the farming lands of north Norfolk, where Sirs Benjamin Britten and James Dyson went to school, in a town that was once burnt to cinders, a 91-year-old former boxer has found a home unlike any he’s ever known, at Holt RFC.
Rugby Towns #3 Clontarf
A meadow of bulls where a thousand years has seen two battles with the barbarians, the birth of Bram Stoker, and lots of rugby silverware. Welcome to the Parish. Welcome to Clontarf.
Rugby Towns #2 Penryn
Two years after beating the All Blacks, the legendary 1971 British & Irish Lions decided to get together for one last hurrah. The men who’d faced down the haka now headed for Penryn, an ancient Cornish borough on a river where pirates once hid, men hauled granite and Spanish ships were sent fleeing by the townsfolk.
Rugby Towns #1 Aspatria
In the kind of town you’ve driven through a thousand times, Viking chiefs once roamed, a shop-keeping British & Irish Lion was raised, Russian KGB agents were snubbed and ‘the Wasps’ were given an almighty fright by the rugby kings of Cumbria.