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The Dover's Hill Games

A great annual sporting occasion during the first half of the ninteenth century was the Dover's Hill Sports. It was held on a grassy plateau above Broadway at apoint where the counties of Worcester, Warwick and Gloucester meet, and the festival was famous all over the county and beyond, for its celebrated Cotswold Olympic Games. The 1818 programme of the meeting states that the festival was "the Admiration of every true and undesigning Briton for more than two centuries, and it is was patronised by the Noble Heroes of the present age, and by every well-wisher for the prosperity of the British Empire".

The games had been the successors of the 'Whit-sun- ales' festivities, but in the seventeenth century Robert Dover, an attorney at Barton-on-the-Heath, Warwickshire, organised the games on a more elaborate scale.
His action formed a revolt from the Puritan attack upon Old English pastimes, and the festivities he started carried on till 1851.

The games lasted generally for three days, starting on the Thursday of Whitsun Week, and had become so popular that each year 30,000 people gathered to see the 'Olympic Games'.