The Bog at Llanwrtyd Wells Was Swum Twice Yesterday and the World Record Has Stood Since 2023
The World Bog Snorkelling Championships ran on Sunday 30 August at Waen Rhydd. Conventional swimming strokes are banned and Neil Rutter's 1:12.34 remains the mark.
The World Bog Snorkelling Championships were held on Sunday 30 August at the Waen Rhydd peat bog outside Llanwrtyd Wells in Powys, starting from around 9:30am with a free shuttle bus running from the town square and a walk of about a mile to the trench.
The competition is a time trial through a channel cut into a peat bog, swum out and back. Sources describe the distance variously as 55 metres per length, per the Guinness World Records entry, or 60 yards each way. Snorkel, mask and flippers are compulsory. The defining rule is negative: conventional swimming strokes are banned. Propulsion has to come from the flippers, with arm movement restricted to a doggy paddle below the surface. Competitors cannot see, because peat suspended in water is opaque, so the trench is swum blind.
The men's world record is 1:12.34, set by Neil Rutter of the UK on 27 August 2023, improving his own 1:18.81 from 2018. The women's record is 1:22.56, set by Kirsty Johnson in 2014. Both are ratified by Guinness World Records.
Conditions vary enough year to year that the record is not a realistic annual target. Rutter won his sixth world title in 2025 in 1:18.13, more than five seconds off his own best, in a field of roughly 200 competitors. A 2026 winner had not been reported at the time of writing.
The championships were founded in 1985 by the late Gordon Green and have run every year since apart from 2020 and 2021. Guinness lists the event as the longest-running bog snorkelling championship in the world, a title that implies competition it does not obviously face. It is organised by Green Events as a charity fundraiser.
The weekend carries other events in the same bog, including a Bogathlon — a triathlon with the swim leg run through the peat — plus wife-carrying and husband-dragging races. A separate mountain bike bog snorkelling championship exists but is usually held in July rather than on this weekend.
Llanwrtyd Wells, population around 850, is the smallest town in Britain and has built an events calendar out of exactly this sort of thing. The bog is the flagship.