Fleetwood Scarecrow Festival!

Cleveleys has its Classic Car Show. Blackpool has its Illuminations. Fleetwood had Tram Sunday, but now there aren’t any trams and it is mainly just a giant loom-band market with candy-floss; so now Fleetwood has its Scarecrow Festival.

Now in its second glorious year they are already calling Fleetwood Scarecrow Festival an ‘annual event’. And they can rightly call it ‘traditional’ too, as other towns have been doing it for centuries.

We couldn’t turn down an opportunity to take part in such a traditional, annual event; and so this year Cleveleys News decided to enter our very own scarecrows in the festival! Want to know how we did it? Of course you do. Brace yourself – here come the facts.

To make a scarecrow you need clothes, and stuffing. We wanted our scarecrows to reflect the culture and style of Cleveleys residents, so where better to dress them than from the charity shops of our beloved town? Sure enough we were able to pick up the garb of an elderly gentleman and a pirate (49% of our population are buccaneers) for the princely sum of £4.

For the stuffing we popped down to Morrisons to raid their recycling bin for old newspapers etc, but as luck would have it the latest July issue of Thornton Cleveleys LINK-MAG had just been released and one of their keen distributors had kindly dumped several thousand copies straight into their bin.

We found 1000s of undelivered LINK-MAGs dumped in the bins at Morrisons

We have always said that LINK-MAG is extremely useful, and can confirm that it does indeed make excellent stuffing. If you are thinking of advertising in the publication we wholeheartedly recommend you do, especially around June/July time as you can guarantee they will be put to good use.

Undelivered LINK-MAGs make great scarecrow stuffing!

If you keep up with Cleveleys News on Twitter and here on our blog then you will know that the name of Cleveleys folk hero Frank Townend is currently under threat by Wyre Council who have essentially given away the community centre named after him to 4 of their pals who have already turned it into a church. As defenders of all things Cleveleys we decided that it would be a fitting gesture to give both our scarecrows the face of Frank Townend. It’s what he would have wanted. Probably even more so than having a community centre named after him.

Stuffed full of LINK mags and looking Frankly it was time to erect our mannequins. We thought the best time to do this was under the cloak of night while traffic was at a minimum, and when Cleveleys News journalists in balaclavas do not stand out quite so much as during the day. First to go up was Pensioner Frank:

Our 'Pensioner Frank' scarecrow in situ

Pirate Frank was a little harder to hammer into the ground due to the cut of his jib, but after some effort it was in the ground and it was time to add our Cleveleys News sign. The sign is extremely lightweight and we did have some concerns about it blowing away in the wind. Mainly because it is written on the back of a sign that blew off a number 14 bus and onto our property, so it is proven to have aeronautical properties. We hope it doesn’t blow away again, but if it does it isn’t our fault and is only returning to its natural equilibrium. Blame Blackpool Transport if anyone.

And here they are in all their glory!

The Cleveleys News scarecrows!

Give them a wave whenever you pass them – you will find them on Amounderness Way, just before the Eros roundabout. They may not be as well-crafted as some other scarecrows, and they do have the strange chemically aroma of cheaply printed matter, but they represent something greater than the sum of their parts.

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