Are you reading me? Fifty Sheds of Wray..

 



Fifty Sheds of Wray

 

And these are just some of the sheds...

 

Fifty Sheds of Wray - just one  of the wonderfully inventive entrants in this year's famous Scarecrow Festival held in the pretty village of Wray in the Lune Valley. Adopting the theme 'Read Me' the villagers used their ingenuity (and their front gardens) to create their own scarecrows which entertained visitors from all over the country.

Strange how scarecrows have always held a fascination for young children. Barbara Euphan Todd's Worzel Gummidge about a girl and boy who discover this 'half scarecrow, half man' was immortalized on television in the nineteen eighties. But I wonder who knows that in the Middle Ages it was the children themselves who were used as crow-scarers...?  Only a shortage of young children apparently prompted farmers to stuff old clothes with straw and place a turnip on top to do the job!

The most famous scarecrow of all has to be from the1939 American fantasy adventure film Wizard of Oz. Based on the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank L Baum, it was not initially a box office success, it seems,  but has made up for it ever since.

'I could while away the hours, conferrin’ with the flowers, consultin’ with the rain. And my head I’d be scratchin’, while my thoughts were busy hatchin',  if I only had a brain...' sang the scarecrow. 

If only I had a brain! Now that's a thought that occurs to me when I'm struggling to find the right words sometimes.  I wonder if anyone else feels the same?