The fifth Whitworth Scarecrow Festival took place from Saturday 27 June to Sunday 5 July, and the talent and imagination on display was as impressive as ever.
The festival saw 30 separate displays scattered across the length of the town, with entries ranging from characters from popular children’s films to original ideas inspired by topical events or pure imagination. Some displays were produced by members of the public and some were made by schools, churches and local businesses and voluntary organisations. The weather was reasonably kind with little rain landing over the course of the nine days, and there was a great take-up of the official trail maps.
The festival spirit was dampened, however, by the vandalism of a couple of scarecrows, with the display made by Healey Care Ltd, situated on the main road in Facit, receiving a lot of damage.
This year the public voted on which display they would like to see win. 146 votes were cast, and the winner was announced at the town’s Family Fun Day on Sunday 5 July:
Winner: ‘Curiouser and Curiouser’ (Orama Avenue)
2nd Place: ‘A Cut Above’ (School Terrace)
3rd place (joint winner): ‘Rasta Crow’ (Princess Street)
3rd place (joint winner): ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf’ (St Bartholomew’s Primary)
All votes cast were automatically entered into a prize draw to win a vegetable box from Facit Garden Centre; the lucky winner was Nickie Baron.
The festival is organised by the Whitworth Tourism and Leisure Committee. Councillor David Chorlton, chair of the Committee says: “The main aims of the festival are to encourage a sense of pride in our town, and to give the community something a little different; judging from the very positive feedback we feel the Festival continues to achieve these aims. On behalf of the Committee, I’d like to thank everyone who took part in the Festival and who took the time to visit the displays. The entrants worked so hard on their displays – some were funny, some more poignant, but all were wonderful and we look forward to doing it all again in 2016. As always, we would encourage as many members of the Whitworth community to take part next year, and dates and details of how to enter will be issued in due course.”
Love all things local - but even more so connecting great local businesses in and around the area!
The following Cookies are used on this Site. Users who allow all the Cookies will enjoy the best experience and all functionality on the Site will be available to you.
You can choose to disable any of the Cookies by un-ticking the box below but if you do so your experience with the Site is likely to be diminished.
In order to interact with this site.
To help us to measure how users interact with content and pages on the Site so we can make
things better.
To show content from Google Maps.
To show content from YouTube.
To show content from Vimeo.
To share content across multiple platforms.
To view and book events.
To show user avatars and twitter feeds.
To show content from TourMkr.
To interact with Facebook.
To show content from WalkInto.