Here is a guest post from one of our favourite Leeds photographers Rick Harrison….
Each August, something a little strange takes shape in the sleepy village of Kettlewell in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales.
For each year the community band together and create over 100 fun scarecrows, which they place in their front gardens and along the village streets, creating a trail for visitors to follow.
It’s been taking place since 1994, and while there are now several scarecrow festivals in villages across the UK, this is the biggest (and dare I say, most impressive).
The money raised goes towards the upkeep of the local school (which serves much of the more remote parts of Wharfdale), the church and the village hall. There’s an optional guide you can buy that details the route around the village, and also has a both a quiz for kids and a quiz for adults to find specific scarecrows or work out who the scarecrow is a caricature of.
Despite intending to go to the festival for the last couple of years, this year was our first visit, and I was genuinely taken aback at just how many scarecrows there were on display – there’s a good few hours entertainment, and its testament to the great Kettlewell community spirit that so much of the village takes part.
The scarecrows range from cartoon characters, to celebrities, politicians, sporting heroes, local tv weather-men and possibly the odd in-joke at a local’s expense. There was even a touching tribute to the late great Frank Sidebottom!
To spice things up there’s a bit of a competition between the villagers too, with awards for the best 3 scarecrows. The winning entries certainly stepped up their game in terms of scale and complexity (but due to their scale are actually a less interesting as a photo – you can find them if you follow the link at the bottom of this article)
One of the most impressive was the Scarecrow wedding – the village church was taken over by scarecrows for the wedding of Cornelia Stook and Hayden Straw, complete with scarecrows of the bride and groom, page boys and bridesmaids, best man, vicar and even several scarecrows in the pews! Nice touches included order-of-service booklets, and even a tandem with “just married” parked outside the church gates.
So – a fun day out, much laughter, and an impressive display of creativity and community spirit – we’ll definitely be returning next year.
The festival runs for a week long (including surrounding weekends) in mid august each year. If you’d like to see more of this year’s crop of scarecrows, there’s a lot more of them on show on my flickr stream
