Quoit on the tracks

Sometimes, an islet of ancient times surges in the middle of modernity. That's what Benjamin and Mathieu, two young men, were illustrating on June the 19th in the new Saint-Serge district : playing quoits on a lane of lawn between the tracks of the trolley and the walls of new buildings. "Quoits are a very old game whose autorship is disputed between Vendée and Brittany", they says.

Having discovered quoits during folk events in the Western provinces they are coming from, they decided to play a game may be theirs ancestors played a long time ago. "Quoits are more simple than pétanque because we don't need a flat surface. In Vendée, quoits are thrown on a square of lead while in Brittany, it's on a wooden square. That's the main difference. Apart from that, quoits are in brass and the rules are the same of the pétanque. So we can take part in quoits anywhere and in every circumstances", point out the two players.


According to Wikipedia, quoits would be much more ancient than presumed. That leisure may have appeared in Greece where "poorer citizens, who could not afford to buy a real discus, made their own by bending horseshoes. The practice was adopted by the Roman army and spread across mainland Europe to Britain".