Bando is a team sport – related to field hockey, hurling, shinty, and bandy – which was first recorded in Wales in the eighteenth century.
The game was first recorded in the late eighteenth century, and in 1797 a traveller en route from Cowbridge to Pyle noted "the extraordinary barrenness" of the locality in ash and elm trees, hard woods ideal for bando bats, and came across hordes of people hastening to the sea shore to watch a game of bando.
[6] Despite a set of rules, the game was still open to violent play with players often using their bando sticks to strike their opponents.
The team are celebrated in a macaronic ballad, "The Margam Bando Boys", written in the earlier part of the nineteenth century.
The game survived in the Aberavon area until the death of Theodore Talbot, the captain of the Margam Bando Boys in 1876.