Easter bottle kicking game - in pictures

The hare pie parade before the somewhat less sedate traditional game of bottle kicking at Hallaton, Leicestershire. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

The event starts with a parade through the villages of Medbourne and Hallaton. Locals carry a large hare pie and the three 'bottles', which are actually small kegs or barrels. Two of the bottles are filled with beer; the third, called 'the dummy', is made of solid wood and painted red and white. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

The pie is blessed by the Hallaton vicar before.... Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

... being cut apart and thrown to the crowd for the 'scramble'. The rest is placed in a sack to be carried up the nearby Hare Pie Hill. Photograph: Darren Staples/Reuters

Each bottle is tossed in the air three times, signaling the start of the competition, and the fighting commences. Photograph: Darren Staples/Reuters

Each team tries to move the bottles, on a best-of-three basis, across two streams one mile apart, by any means possible. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

The contest is a rough one, with teams fighting to move the bottles over such obstacles as ditches, hedges, and barbed wire. Emergency services are not too far away throughout the game. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

The tradition has been cancelled only once in the last 200 years: in 2001 because of concerns over foot-and-mouth disease. Photograph: Darren Staples/Reuters

There are virtually no rules to the bottle-kicking, except that there is no eye-gouging, no strangling, and no use of weapons. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

Wellies are a key part of the bottle-kicking kit due to the amount of time spent on the muddy fields. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

A solitary woman, towards the right, among hundreds of men scrambling for the 'bottle'. Photograph: Darren Staples/Reuters

Participants and spectators return to the village after the game. Those players who put in an especially good effort, for example carrying a barrel across the goal stream or holding on to a barrel for quite some time, are helped up onto the top of the ten-foot-tall Buttercross, and the opened bottle is passed up for them to drink from before being passed around the crowd. Photograph: Darren Staples/Reuters