Would you still charm me if I was a worm?

It's a sunny June afternoon in the Cheshire village of Willaston and something strange is afoot. Or, rather, underfoot. The community primary school’s playing field is a hotbed of activity. Children and adults traipse the grassy expanse — painted with three-metre-square plots and bounded by cake tables and craft stalls — all carting strange equipment, from garden forks and foam cudgels to ukuleles and power drills. These are tools for a peculiar, soil-flecked competition, for which Willaston is ground zero. Welcome to the World Worm Charming Championships.

Worm charming is the act of vibrating a patch of soil, causing earthworms to squirm up through the turf to be collected. In 1881’s bestselling The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, pre-eminent worm hype-man Charles Darwin hypothesised that the worms believe that ‘they are pursued by a mole’.

In the US, it’s known as ‘worm grunting’ and most associated with the Florida Panhandle, where it’s long been employed to source fishing bait. There, its practitioners bow a short wooden stake (called a ‘stob’) with a ‘rooping iron’, sending low-frequency drones into the earth to flush out the slippery invertebrates.

Cheshire’s version is less mercenary: a jolly bash in which no worms are harmed. It was founded in 1980 for the school summer fête by then-deputy headmaster John Bailey, who drew 100 three-yard-square plots on the playing field with an old tennis-court marker.

The inaugural winner was farmer’s son Tom Shufflebottom, who enticed a cracking 511 worms — an auspicious start. Bailey soon ceded control to Gordon Farr — a former headmaster, now long-time organiser and founder of the International Federation of Charming Worms and Allied Pastimes (or IFCWAP) — and village policeman Mike Forster.

A few years later, the pair got wind of a rival contest in Blackawton, Devon, also calling itself the World Championship. The Willaston boys took them to task. ‘We realised we had to take on the responsibility of the worm-charming fraternity,’ says Forster. They founded IFCWAP (of which they’re the only members) and set out their official rules of worm charming, one of which is a ban on using liquid to soak the soil — a technique still permitted at the Devon event, now known as the International Festival of Wormcharming. Its organisers declined to comment.

Little has changed in the years since, save for a shift from imperial to metric measurements (‘to bring us in line with Europe,’ confirms Farr). It’s now a competition of such prestige that Guinness ratified a world record here in 2009 — 10-year-old Sophie Smith coaxing up 567 worms — and it has gained international traction, the rules translated into multiple languages (Fijian, Korean and Icelandic among them) in case any foreign delegations fancy a pop. Russian, Farr adds, was tricky, as the language lacks a word for ‘charm’.

As well as the liquids ban, IFCWAP maintains a staunch ‘no digging’ rule. ‘It doesn’t matter how old the competitor is, it’s a red card,’ sighs Forster. He also raises the pervasive issue of ‘premature worm grasping… when people go for the worm too soon and he either goes back in or you get a tug of war.’ (The RSPCA, it should be noted, has commended the event’s high worm welfare.)

Almost anything else is fair game and, inevitably, Farr and Forster have seen some bizarre things — not least the participation of a horse named Flicker, trained to hoof the earth. ‘He had to have a corner plot,’ remembers Farr, ‘because any excrement had to fall outside the charming area.’

They’ve had to stamp down on some flagrant cheating, too. ‘One year, a guy arrived on a bike,’ says Forster. ‘During the charming, he was doing a rain dance, unclipped his bicycle trouser clips and worms began cascading down! That was banned straight away. Shocking.’

Back to the field. At 2pm, a bell rings and a 30-minute charming window commences. A cacophony of psychedelic earth-thumping rises and, soon, gleeful squealing as the worms begin to emanate from the grass. Many participants are using garden forks — stuck in the ground and their tines or handles bashed to judder the soil beneath in a method known around here as ‘twanging’.

Some of the gathered masses are more creative. As veteran Matt Sefton rhythmically smacks his fork prongs with two sticks in the classic style, his son William, 13, blasts a rousing and mellifluous rendition of the Indiana Jones theme at the grass with a trumpet. Erik Satie’s lilting piano vignette Gymnopédie No 3 is also on the sheet, but, Sefton explains, it lacks the tumult to startle the worms into action. ‘We wanted maximum aggression.’

Three plots away, university student Millie Searing is also on a twanging bent, albeit aided by some doofing drum ’n’ bass from a portable speaker. Nearby, a slight man with an overhanging mop of hair prostrates himself on the ground, surrounded by wind-up bath toys. A few feet across, a woman lays down a small wooden board and elegantly tap dances atop.

Finally, I locate Forster’s son, Tom, and his grandsons, Ted and Sam. The centrepiece of their square is a wooden box, raised on four legs with a disembodied, Monty Python-style mannequin’s foot protruding beneath, the stamping motion of which is controlled with a pulley.

The bell rings; the contest is over. Was it a vintage year? ‘I’m not sure we’ve a winning number, but it’s a lot — more than 100,’ notes Tom, sweat-flecked and visibly pooped. How did the Python foot fare? ‘Oh, it broke, but we got two worms with it,’ Ted, 13, adds stoically.

After all the charming brouhaha, the counting table is more hushed. A whiteboard of plots is being filled in as cups of soil and worms are tipped onto plates and carefully picked at, the worms then gently popped into a nearby trench for safekeeping until the birds have gone to bed, thus avoiding any massacres. There are many zeros, but the majority of the almost-complete board is in double digits.

One strip — in the south-western part of the field — is all that’s left. ‘It was a wet corner,’ someone in the crowd says; this is where they’re expecting the big numbers. Some fevered muttering implies it could be tight — there’s even talk of a five-minute ‘worm-off’, if it’s too close to call.

When all but three squares are filled, it’s time for the big reveal. The prospect of a tie is ill-founded: Archie, 10, and Sienna, 11, have prevailed with a nifty 164 worms, much to their friends’ euphoria. Their technique? ‘We just banged the grass!’ they say in unison, grasping a gleaming trophy. They’re not giving any more away; understandable reticence in victory, their secrets preserved for next summer’s title defence.

As proceedings wrap up, Forster mulls over worm-charming’s evergreen appeal. Community spirit aside, it’s the raw spectacle that he finds astounding, year on year. ‘There’s a few minutes where everything has to wake up. Then it’s almost magical — as if they’re coming out of a sponge.’ As well as Blackawton, the UK has a third contest.

Founded in 2021 by Georgia Gendall, the Falmouth Worm Charming Championships operates with a comparable ‘Charm, don’t harm!’ credo, but is an even more outré undertaking than Willaston’s, with elaborate fancy dress folded into the mix. As an artist whose work ‘celebrates, challenges and disrupts interspecies dependencies’, Gendall’s take on the calling is more holistic than the joyfully irreverent philosophy espoused in Willaston.

‘Worm charming creates a kind of shared attention on something usually overlooked: earthworms, which are essential to healthy soil and ecosystems — celebrating the hidden labour of the natural world,’ she explains. ‘[It’s about] participating in a slightly absurd, very human ritual that reconnects you to your body, to other people and to the ground beneath your feet.’ What could be more charming than that?

The article originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.