The Bottle Inn hosts the annual World Nettle Eating Championships as part of a charity beer festival. Competitors are served long stalks of stinging nettles from which they pluck and eat the leaves. After an hour the bare stalks are measured and the winner is the competitor with the greatest accumulated length of nettles. The contest began in the late 1980s when two farmers argued over who had the longest stinging nettles in their field and evolved into the World Nettle Eating Championships when one of the farmers promised to eat any nettle which was longer than his. The championship has separate men’s and women’s sections and attracts competitors from as far afield as Canada and Australia.
