"Tuesday. Hot. That lot from across the marsh have been at it again. Playing a stupid game on their broomsticks. A big leather ball landed in my cabbages."
     -- from the diary of Gertie Keddle, 11th Century

Eight hundred years ago, a group of witches and wizards used an damp stretch of nettle-filled ground called Queerditch Marsh as a place to play a new game they had invented. This game involved broomsticks and a "big leather ball." Soon they added a couple of heavy rocks, bewitched to try to knock players off their brooms. The whole business was observed by a witch named Gertie Keddle who wrote about what she saw, in badly spelled Saxon, in her diary. That diary is now in the Museum of Quidditch in London (QA). Queerditch Marsh itself has been made Unplottable (interview with Raincoast Books).

It took two centuries more for the game of Quidditch to evolve to its present form, but the crude beginnings as well as the strange name came from Queerditch Marsh.