The Gurning World Championship Is Judged Through a Horse Collar and This Year's Fair Is the Seven Hundred and Fifty-Ninth

The World Gurning Championships are held on Saturday 19 September at the Egremont Crab Fair in west Cumbria, the 759th edition of a fair granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1267. Competitors frame their heads inside a horse collar, known locally as a braffin, and distort their faces. Judges score the extremity of the result.

The defending champions are Ryan Barton in the men's competition, Lynn Kelly in the women's and Kendall Lister in the junior. Organisers have said two celebrities will take part this year without naming them.

The record holders are formidable. Guinness World Records credits Tommy Mattinson with 18 men's titles, won in 1986 and 1987, 1999, from 2001 to 2008, from 2010 to 2014, in 2019 and in 2023, verified at Egremont on 16 September that year. He beat his own father Gordon's previous record of ten. His signature face is called the Wolf. Anne Woods holds the women's record with 28 titles, ratified by Guinness in November 2010 after a long campaign for recognition; she died in 2015 aged 67. The women's championship was formally introduced in 1978 and the junior in 1979. Mrs Mabel Braddock was the first woman to compete, in 1966, and Marie Quinn, reported as the American champion, is the only woman to have placed in the overall top three, finishing second in 1974.

Gurning was already described as an ancient tradition in an account from 1852. The braffin format is a twentieth-century refinement.

The fair takes its name from the crab apples in season in September, not from crustaceans. Ordinary eating apples are now thrown from a cart to the crowd in the Parade of the Apple Cart, a survival of the medieval lord's harvest distribution to his serfs. The greasy pole at the Market Cross is thirty feet high; the prize was originally a top hat, and by 1852 a side of mutton, which was cut up and shared among the poor if nobody had climbed the pole by nightfall.

The rest of Saturday's programme is hound trails, Cumberland wrestling, hunting horn blowing, hunting songs, dialect singing, a music tent, a vintage vehicle display and hook-a-duck played with a digger. Fair week from 13 to 18 September carries wheelbarrow and pram races, a clay pigeon shoot, pipe smoking, darts and the Steve Foster Memorial Multi-Terrain Race. This year's fair is dedicated to Foster, a former president of the fair who died earlier in the year.

The fair has missed only the two world wars and the years from 2020 to 2022.