We had a boules pitch constructed in the back garden of our pub — the Plough at Wrington, Somerset — and it has proved a big draw to our customers over the past few years.
The Plough Inn is a food pub, but we wanted to keep the drinking and community side of the business going and this provides an extremely social focus to the pub’s activities.
Boules in England is a growing sport, with 23,000 official players, but tens of thousands more operate ‘under the radar’. Here in the south-west there have been significant hotspots of interest.
For example, in the Thornbury area there are 11 pubs with boules pitches that operate their own league. There are also growing numbers of festivals here — the annual ones at Bath, Sherston, Wiltshire, and Cheltenham are some of the best known.
But what can it do for my pub? In essence, it is a relaxed family and sociable game, so attracts the sort of people you’d want in your pub.
It mixes well with having a few drinks and even some food and also provides a good platform to create extra interest in the pub through tournaments and fun days.
In the Plough we have 16 teams in our league. There are three playing members per team, plus two spares (for when certain members cannot play). These teams often bring other people to watch. The league runs for 16 weeks. There are two games per night, which brings in roughly 18 to 20 people.
Where it really begins to add up is when you have multiple pitches. At our other pub, the Rattlebone Inn in Sherston, we have
three pitches, and three leagues of 16 teams each, so 48 teams. This attracts 50 to 60 people on Monday to Thursday into the pub just to play boules. We then run singles leagues to carry on through the winter. The village also holds a boules festival once a year, which gives us a week’s worth of trading in one day.
So what’s the downside? Not much.
You need an area of 3m by 12m (although some people get away with 10m), and the cost of laying a pitch is £1,500.
A good local workman can do it, or we have found that a company called Complete Boules is very helpful and can do the work for you.
- Jason Read is licensee of the Plough Inn in Wrington, Somerset and the Rattlebone Inn in Sherston, Wiltshire