Frome Town

Frome sits among the Somerset hills, a market town whose football club has occupied the same corner of it, Badgers Hill on Berkley Road, since 1904. For most of that time the ground drew little attention beyond match days, until 2022, when a loan dispute threatened to close it. Frome Town Council paid off the lender, then exercised an option to buy the site outright for £1 the following year, passing it to a community benefit society to keep it as a local asset rather than let it fall to a developer.

The club's best-remembered afternoon on the pitch predates all of that by decades: an FA Cup run in 1954–55 reached the First Round Proper, where Frome Town lost to Leyton Orient in front of 8,000 people at Badgers Hill, still the biggest crowd the ground has held. Most of the silverware since has come from Somerset and Western League competitions rather than anywhere higher, though the 2025–26 season broke that pattern — the Southern League Division One South title carried the Robins up to Step 3 for the first time. Westbury United remain the sharper fixture on the calendar, contested as the Wessex Derby, with Bath City and Weston-super-Mare also on the list of old rivals.

One episode from 2004 still gets repeated locally: with home form poor, the club called in the "white witch" Titania Hardie, who advised changing the colour scheme in the dressing rooms. Frome Town won eight of their next nine games at Badgers Hill. Less unusual, but longer-lasting, was the contribution of Derek Brain, who played for the club in 1966 and then managed the first team for more than eight years from 1969.