Only in England...

I'm always on the lookout for examples of English eccentricity and so I was taken by the Knutsford Great Race which is held every ten years in the Cheshire town of that name and is a race for "penny-farthing" bicycles. It attracts entries from all over the world it appears. Great!! By the way, penny-farthings weren't originally called that - they were called "ordinaries" - the name penny-farthing appears to have come along after the event as it were. And for those who don't go back that far, a farthing was a small coin worth a quarter ("fourth-ing") of an old penny. If memory serves, it used to have the image of a bird on the reverse side - was it a wren? Penny-farthings had their heyday in the 1870s, but within a decade or so had given way to the early forms of what we would recognise today as a bicycle.