Hoop Rolling - Modern Usage

Modern Usage

Early 19th century travellers saw children playing with hoops over much of Europe and beyond.

The game was also a common pastime of African village children on the Tanganyka plateau, and not long after it is recorded in the Freetown settler community. In China the game may well go back to 1000 BCE or further. Christian missionaries encountered it there in the 19th century. Children in late Edo period Japan also were known to play the game.

In English the sport is known by several names, hoop and stick, bowling hoops, or gird and cleek in Scotland, where the gird is the hoop and the cleek, the stick.

In the west around the end of the 19th century, the game was played by boys up to about twelve years of age. Hoops would at times have pairs of tin squares nailed to the inside of the circle, to jingle as the hoop was rolled. Up to a dozen such pairs of rattles might be placed around the rim of the hoop. Some preferred the ashen hoops, round on the outside and flat on the inside, to the ones made of iron, as the latter could break windows and hurt the legs of the passers by and horses.