Heather Scarecrow Festival
The village of Heather, Kings Award winner, goes cheerfully insane each August as gardens fill with hundreds of scarecrows depicting celebrities and topical characters, all competing for votes from the crowds who walk the trail with a guide booklet.
Cottages, B&Bs and hotels near Heather, Leicestershire.
Some stay links are affiliate links. More
Add the free Villagly badge to your own website. It shows visitors you are listed with us and links them straight back to this page.
Get the free badge →Event details come from organisers and can change. Please check with the organiser before you travel.
"A free and friendly folkie takeover of 13 atmospheric venues with Morris dancing, sing-arounds and an outdoor market stage across the old market town."
Melton Folk Festival
"A Leicestershire village fills its gardens, drives and lamp posts with over a hundred themed scarecrows each August Bank Holiday, inviting visitors to walk the trail and vote for their favourite over three days."
Desford Scarecrow Festival
"The self styled Rural Capital of Food throws its October festival around the pork pie and the Stilton, with one of the largest gatherings of artisan cheesemakers in the country."
Melton Mowbray Food Festival
"A free Christmas Folk Trail strings live acoustic music through the pubs and tea rooms of a Leicestershire market town across a full December weekend."
Melton Winter Festival
"After a hare pie is scrambled, two villages battle to carry small barrels across streams in a no-rules contest."
Hallaton Bottle Kicking and Hare Pie Scramble
✦ Weird and Wonderful"A Midlands agricultural show with over a century of tradition, combining cattle, sheep, horse and show jumping competitions with a family entertainment programme at its rural Leicestershire ground."
Ashby Show
"At the Barley Mow pub in Bonsall village, hens race over a thirty-foot course in heats building to a grand final, watched by enthusiastic crowds who take this Derbyshire Peak District tradition with exactly the gravity it deserves."
Bonsall World Championship Hen Racing
✦ Weird and Wonderful"At midnight on Boxing Day, a mob of villagers paraders through Broughton in Northamptonshire banging tin cans, dustbin lids and any other available metal objects to drive away a witch who is said to have terrorised the village centuries ago, a custom so relentlessly noisy and purposeful that nothing else quite like it survives in England."
Broughton Tin Can Band
✦ Weird and Wonderful"A 700-year-old Lincolnshire custom where a leather tube is wrestled by hundreds of villagers toward one of four pubs, preceded by a Fool being smoked over a fire and the Lord of the Hood making proclamations in the church."
Haxey Hood Game
✦ Weird and Wonderful"On a June weekend, Bromyard's market town fills with scarecrows on a Heroes or Villains theme, culminating in a Friday evening grand parade where schools, scouts and families wheel their creations through the streets to the town green for judging."
Bromyard Scarecrow Festival
✦ Weird and Wonderful"A Lincolnshire village vintage show with over 250 classic vehicles, a Lancaster Bomber flypast and the 19th World Egg Throwing Championships, where international teams hurl eggs for distance, accuracy and sheer spectacular mess."
Swaton Vintage Day and World Egg Throwing Championships
✦ Weird and Wonderful"In its 52nd year, the world's only toe wrestling championship returns to Ashbourne Market Place where barefoot competitors lock toes and try to pin each other's foot to the ground in a sport invented in 1974 and officially rejected by the International Olympic Committee."
World Toe Wrestling Championship
✦ Weird and Wonderful