The glossy mahogany-brown nuts of the horse chestnut or conker tree, are commonly known as conkers, after the game played with them by generations of children. However, unlike the nuts of the similarly named but unrelated sweet chestnut tree, conkers aren’t edible to humans unless cooked. However they are widely used for crafts such as model-making as well as games.
What are conkers?
Conkers are the nuts of the horse chestnut or conker tree. True nuts, they sit within a spiky fruit casing. When they fall to the ground in autumn their shells often split to reveal the shiny brown conker inside. Its shine fades with age.
The game of conkers has been popular amongst children for almost two hundred years, since horse chestnut trees were widely planted in parks and streets. ‘Conkers’ is played in pairs, using the nuts threaded individually on to string or shoelaces. Each player takes it in turn to try and hit the other’s conker and the winner is the one who breaks their opponent’s conker, so no pieces remain on the string. The name ‘conkers’ may have derived from the word ‘conk’ which is slang for ‘to bash’ or ‘hit’, and also for a person’s head, or it may have come from the word ‘conqueror’ or winner. The World Conker Championships, which have taken place annually in Northamptonshire since 1965, have raised over £400,000 for charity.
What’s the difference between conkers and sweet chestnuts?
The nuts of the conker tree and sweet chestnut tree are both rich dark brown in colour and produced within green outer casings, but there the similarity ends. Horse chestnut shells have short spikes all over, and the nuts are round and glossy. Sweet chestnut shells have many fine spikes, and each case houses two or three, flattened
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