Snowboarding is generally considered to have been inspired by surfing and skateboarding, bursting onto the mountains and into the paths of irate skiers in late 1970s North America, when Jake Burton Carpenter started Burton snowboards from a backyard shed in Vermont.

However a new Patagonia film, Foothills: The Unlinked Heritage of Snowboarding, reveals that the people of a small logging community at around 2,000m in the Kaçar mountains in Eastern Turkey, far from the surf and skateparks, might have invented something very similar to snowboarding roughly 300 years ago.

The Petran board is made by hammering planks together and attaching a guiding rope Credit: Patagonia/Wrk:Shrt

The film's narrator and co-director, American pro-snowboarder and Patagonia ambassador Alex Yoder, follows rumours to Turkey and a small, isolated village called Meseköy (formerly Petran) with fellow rider Nick Russell, in search of the truth – and fresh powder.

In the village, which is deep in snow in the winter and where little has changed for hundreds of years, legend goes that a small boy accidently came upon the pleasure of sliding sideways. Tasked with cleaning his father’s prayer mat, he found it was easier to rub it in the snow with his feet than with his hands. And from that small seed, thin planks were hammered into a wide, rectangular platform, a string attached to the front to guide the nose, a stick grabbed to help with steering and balance. Petran boarding was born, and has since been passed down through the generations, completely independently from the development of snowboarding elsewhere.

Telegraph logo This video content is no longer available To watch The Telegraph's latest video content please visit youtube.com/telegraph

It does look similar to the way snow surfing started in North America, with Sherman Poppen’s Snurfer, patented in 1966. Poppen hit on the idea of tying two children’s skis together to provide entertainment on Christmas day 1965 for his kids, when the snow proved too shallow for sledging. Narrower than a snowboard (Poppen went on to adapt waterskis), it was, like a Petran board, ridden without bindings and had a rope to help with balance and to guide it. Though Poppen saw it largely as a back-garden toy like a sledge it was marketed with the slogan “Rides like a surfboard, manoeuvres like a ski”, and was partly responsible for sparking an idea in Jake Burton’s mind.

It wasn’t until the late Seventies, when Burton started experimenting with adding fixed bindings to the board and dropping the rope, that snowboards started looking more like the ones used today.

The Snurfer, invented in 1965, looks very similar to the Petran board Credit: Snurferboards.com

Watching Foothills, it’s clear that in Petran the boards haven’t progressed as far. The planks may be softened using steam from a kettle and bent into slightly more curved shape, and cow fat rubbed on the underside to help them glide, but the Petran boards Yoder discovers remain primitive compared to modern snowboards, and are still ridden without bindings and using the rope and a stick, through the dug-out paths and deep snow of the village.

As well as discovering Petran boarding for themselves – they’re pretty good at it – Yoder and Russell hitch a lift on a ramshackle snowcat to get deeper into the Kaçars and ride deserted off-piste slopes on their modern boards, speeding along rolling spines and through snow-stuffed gullies, bouncing over pillows created by what look like abandoned sheds. When they’d set off for Turkey, sceptics wondered if it was even possible to snowboard there – the film shows its rarely charted possibilities to the full.

Even so, the art of building and riding the Petran boards seems to be a dying one, though Yoder meets one villager, Hizir Havuz, who's made it his misson to keep it alive, starting festivals and workshops. But he tells Yoder he fears the younger generation is more interested in social media and popular entertainment than learning the craftsmanship and understanding the cultural significance of the boards.

The people of this village have been riding boards for 300 years Credit: Patagonia/Wrk:Shrt

Yoder isn't the first pro snowboarder who made the pilmgrimage to Meseköy, however. In 2009 legendary American rider Jeremy Jones made a film about what they call Lazboards – Laz is another former name of the village – meeting a 70-year-old rider called Selim who tells him how his forefathers used the boards: "At the time of our grandfathers there were no cafés in the villages; riding was the only thing they did to have fun."

So can Meseköy/Petran claim to be the birthplace of snowboarding? Yoder’s conclusion: “While it’s not snowboarding as we know it, the feeling’s the same.” So maybe.

Ski with Olympian Martin Bell on an exclusive 10-day Telegraph Ski and Snowboard trip to Banff, Canada.