The Heather Scarecrow Festival 2018 is in full swing until the 5th August, so we took a trip along this evening to see this year’s entries. To those not familiar with it, the little village of Heather in Leicestershire is now celebrating the 20th anniversary of the scarecrow festival, where various local residents make scarecrows,…
I wrote recently about the fantastic new statue of Æthelflæd in Tamworth recently, and it seems that statues are en vogue in the midlands at the minute. This week saw the unveiling of the new John Bonham statue in Redditch, honouring one of the Worcestershire town’s most famous sons, with a piece of work by Mark Richards. …
It is often quoted that Britain has an issue with a lack of diversity among its statues, with most of them being of white men. There is also an often held erroneous belief that impressive women who changed society in Britain appeared in our history in the mid nineteenth century, with many being hard pressed…
The 2017 Heather Scarecrow Festival has been ongoing in the Leicestershire village, and as normal, the residents have produced some fantastic scarecrows to entertain those who come to visit each summer. I’ve added some photos before of the 2014, 2015 and 2016 events, so here are some of this year’s entries. There always seem to be…
The bank holiday weekend saw the Moira Canal Festival 2017, which helps to raise funds for the Ashby Canal. The festival has developed a reputation for having a remarkable series of activities and displays. Each year has seen a historical reenactment and this year’s group was the Coldstream Guards from the Napoleonic Wars. Not only…
The previously mentioned universal truth that young children are invariably fans of dinosaurs continues to hold in my house, so we headed off this weekend to see Dinosaur World 2017 in Derby. The theatre was full of families, with plenty of small children, as Miranda, who was to be our tour guide through Dinosaur World,…
2017 has just started and today, 2nd January, was a glorious day in this part of the world, so it seemed a great opportunity to get outside. We took a trip to Croxden Abbey, or more formally, Abbey of the Vale of St. Mary at Croxden, in Staffordshire. The abbey started life in 1176 when…
Fans of Dr Who will be aware that the Cybermen, probably one of the three most famous opponents of the Doctor alongside the Daleks and The Master, first appeared in The Tenth Planet, shown in 1966 and set in the then futuristic world of 1986. 2016 then sees their 50th anniversary, and The National Space…
You see some odd sights on the main roads and motorways as you travel around the country, including some human powered vehicles, and an unexpected piece of road haulage I spotted on my way to Donington Park recently was a Boeing 737 on the A42. Being just around the corner from East Midlands Airport and…
Like much of the UK, the Leicestershire countryside hosts a series of local fetes and festivals over the summer, many of which are actually impressively large events relative to the size of the village hosting them. Such is the Shakerstone Festival 2016, and for that matter, each year at the festival. The village is small,…
I took a trip to the 2016 Heather Scarecrow Festival today, just in time before the week long display of locally made scarecrows came to an end. I have written before about the 2014 and the 2015 events, and this year was another superb crop of crows. It is the 18th running of the festival…
This weekend saw the Moira Canal Festival 2016, the annual local fundraiser for the Ashby Canal that has a fantastically varied series of events. I’ve written about the 2013, 2014 and 2015 events, and as with those and other previous years, I went along to see what was going on. The trip to Moira is…