After initially knocking the ball about for shits and giggles, Matlock finally got serious and joined the local Derbyshire League in search of some meaningful, competitive football. They got it, won two successive championship triumphs in the 1890s and, brimming with misplaced confidence, moved into the much stronger Midland League. “We’ll urinate on that tin-pot league, old chap!” a club official told the local newspaper at the time.

Big mistake. Matlock’s 1902/1903 campaign must surely rank as one of the more embarrassingly inept ever seen in English football. They lost every single one of their games, scoring a pathetic nine goals while shipping a whopping 130. It’s enough to make even Derby County fans weep. In an admirable display of effortless understatement, Matlock’s official history notes ‘it goes without saying that they were relegated’. Which is, we suppose, an improvement on saying ‘they were probably relegated’.

Disbanding and then reforming over the war years, Matlock competed with some success in various leagues before moving into the Northern Premier League in 1969. At the time it was a top flight non-league division, and although its stature has been diminished somewhat with pyramid reshuffles over the decades, Matlock have remained within its sweaty grasp ever since.

Of course, being NPL stalwarts ourselves, we’ve crossed swords with Matlock on a fair number of occasions, and in many of the games that really matter Boston have often emerged as second best. Indeed, Matlock’s cup exploits appear to outstrip our own. They actually won the FA Trophy ten years before our own trip to Wembley, spanking some long-defunct outfit called Scarborough by four clear goals, trampled over us on the way to NPL Shield glory two years later and, as lower league underdogs, dumped us out of the FA Cup in 89/90 on their way to a place third round exit at the hands of Scunthorpe.

But fear not - revenge lurks in the annuls of seasons past, for in 1996 Matlock were relegated into the NPL Division One under the less-than-astute stewardship of Imre Varadi, fresh from his disastrous stint at York Street. Karma. Probably.

And, er, that’s it.

But it’s worth enduring the chronic, fume-spewing congestion, for behind the cosy tea-rooms and seaside feel lies a genuinely agreeable town in a very agreeable part of the world, right in the middle of the Peak District and within a short distance of Chatsworth, Castleton’s caverns - and several million restored mills and waterwheels, including the one at Whatstandwell.