CALLING ALL SCARECROWS!
We are running our popular School Scarecrow competition again this year! Will your school enter? We're looking for scarecrows made by local school children to help keep the birds away from the crops growing in our two-acre Kitchen Garden. The search is also a way to get school children thinking about how crops are grown and how farmers worked in previous centuries. It's free to enter but schools must register, please click here to let us know you want to enter.
The winning scarecrow will earn its class a free school trip to Doddington Hall for up to 40 children.
Entries must arrive between Friday 15 April and Thursday 21 April. Judging takes place on Friday 6 May. We would be grateful if you could come and collect your entry on or shortly after Monday 9 May.
Again, we're encouraging teachers and children to imagine that they are farmers from many years ago and to think about what they could use that would reflect times past or makes the most of things that would otherwise be thrown in the bin!
Fun facts about scarecrows...
If Doddington Hall was in Scotland, it would be looking for a ‘tattie bogie’, in Somerset it would be a ‘mommet’ or in Devon a ‘murmet’. But here in Lincolnshire, the name of what Doddington Hall is looking for is a scarecrow.
In today was Medieval Britain, the Hall would be looking for ten boys as in those days the job was given to boys aged nine or over whose job it was to shoo the birds away. If a bird landed they would run after it waving their arms or throwing stones. The Great Plague in 1348 killed half the population, and so farmers faced a shortage of bird shooers. To improvise, they made scarecrows with sacks of straw, ragged clothes and faces carved into large turnips or gourds. It’s incredible to think that, despite our modern technology, the old-fashioned scarecrow has survived and we still see these helpful fellows silently protecting our crops and our food.
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