Our First Scarecrow Festival

We live in a lovely village called Barton Mills on the banks of the Lark River. The village is mostly residential, but we do have 2 pubs and an inn. Generally the village is quiet and overlooked by passers-by, but one weekend a year it becomes a hot destination. Barton Mills hosts an annual Scarecrow Festival--not in autumn when you might expect, but in June. This weekend our quiet town was transformed into a festive fair, and each household was responsible for displaying a scarecrow. Most years a bale of hay is dumped on each doorstep, signaling the appropriate time to begin making a scarecrow. But this year the theme was recycling and the scarecrows were to be made from any recyclable materials. Our creation is above (the first photo), and we mostly made one just to check the box, not to be extremely creative. We stuffed it with shredded paper.

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There's also a competition in connection with the Festival; it's called "The Turnoff Prize" (a play on the Turner Prize). The entries consist of any artistic work made strictly from recycled materials. Here are a couple of our favorite Turnoff Prize entries. (The first one--on the left--was actualy pumping water like a fountain; they called it "Water Music." Fabulous!) We did not enter this competition. Maybe next year.

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Friday we went to London for the first time (much overdue). We had a wonderful time, but we decided to blog about the scarecrows instead. Here are a few photos to prove we did it!