In a field near the Solway Firth, sheep graze between rows of old stones. It looks just like any other stretch of farmland in the Scottish countryside. But according to one historian, this patch of land might hold a surprising piece of sports history: the oldest known football pitch in the world.
Ged O’Brien, a sports historian and founder of the Scottish Football Museum, says new archaeological evidence shows that people were playing football here in the 1600s — more than 200 years before the rules of the modern game were written down in England.
“This is one of my greatest days ever,” O’Brien told The Times while standing on the site. “We’re stood on the proof that we need to show that Scotland invented modern world football.”
A Forgotten Letter, A Field of Stones
The evidence begins with a letter. Written by Reverend Samuel Rutherford in the early 1600s, it described a piece of land on Mossrobin Farm in Anwoth, Kirkcudbrightshire (probably read out loud as Kirshire): “There was a piece of ground on Mossrobin farm where on Sabbath afternoon the people used to play at football.” Rutherford, incensed at the sacrilegious matches disrupting the Sabbath, ordered the parishioners to drag a line of large stones across the pitch to stop the games.
To O’Brien, this was a map. “This is one of the most important sentences I have ever read in football history,” he said. “Because it specifically identifies the exact place the football pitch was.”
With a team of archaeologists, O’Brien went looking — and found the stones. Fourteen of them, slicing across a flat field. Soil tests conducted by Phil Richardson of Archaeology Scotland confirmed the rocks had been placed there around the same time as Rutherford’s furious edict.
“This backs up the story that a barrier was put across an open space,” said Richardson. “It’s not about stock control. It’s not about agriculture or land boundaries. This is not a wall. It’s a temporary barrier to stop a particular event happening — in this case, football.”
From above, the area resembles a natural amphitheatre. “You do get that sense of it,” said archaeologist Kieran Manchip. “Being here in the landscape and seeing how it all pieces together — all of those things corroborate with one another.”
Not Quite Mob Football
What makes the claim explosive isn’t just that football was played in 17th-century Scotland. It’s how it was played.
“In the history books, football is mob-football. It was chaos, people drunk, it’s anarchy,” said O’Brien. “Now this is entirely and utterly mistaken.”
Mob-football, popular across medieval Europe, was wild — hundreds chasing an inflated pig’s bladder across town. Minimal rules, maximal violence. But what happened in Anwoth, O’Brien argues, was something else.
“If you’re playing football every Sunday of every year, you’ve got rules because you have to agree on rules,” he said. “You couldn’t play violent football because you needed to work on Monday. So you’re thinking about your football. You’re playing regular football.”
To O’Brien, this pattern of consistency implies structure — a set of conventions that predate the formal codification of the sport by over two centuries.
In England, the Football Association came to be in 1863 by alumni of elite schools like Eton and Harrow. The first international match — Scotland vs. England — wasn’t held until 1872. But by then, O’Brien argues, Scotland had already developed a homegrown culture of the game. “In 1872, the minute international football started, Scottish clubs were absolutely destroying English teams,” he said. “It’s absolutely no surprise because these people are 200 years in front of what England is doing.”
A Game for the World
Whether the football played at Anwoth looked exactly like today’s game is impossible to say. But the essence was already there: teams, a field, regular matches, and agreed rules.
“This is the ancestor, the grandparent, of modern world football,” said O’Brien. “And it’s Scottish.”
From dusty streets in Brazil to snowy alleys in Oslo, the game has taken root across every continent. “You can be up the side of a mountain in the Himalayas, watching a football game,” O’Brien mused, “and the ghosts of Anwoth will be watching.”
BBC Scotland’s A View From The Terrace will shed some light on the story. But its impact may stretch far beyond one episode. If O’Brien’s discovery holds up to scrutiny, it won’t just change the history of football. It will restore a forgotten field, long buried under centuries of silence, to its rightful place on the world’s sporting map.
And perhaps — as the next World Cup anthem echoes “football’s coming home” — a few voices may add, “to Scotland.”
