A Scarecrow Safari in Endon
Chris Hay. Endon, Staffordshire.
In rural Derbyshire there’s a charming spring and summer tradition called well dressing, as part of which participating villages across the county adorn their wells, springs, fountains, and other water sources with large pictorial boards decorated with flower petals, lichens, mosses, beans, and seeds. While fascinating – as Peter Ross has noted, the folk art has the appearance of ‘giant phantasmagoric stamp[s]’ – the custom itself is of little interest to me photographically, although a handful of the ceremonies are accompanied by annual scarecrow competitions, festivals, and trails.
Like many of my generation I’ve been psychologically scarred by Worzel Gummidge (the original Jon Pertwee incarnation) so scarecrows are very much up my street, although, despite hundreds if not thousands of miles of countryside walking across the UK, I’ve encountered vanishingly few ‘in the wild’. So this rolling calendar of curated specimens, all within striking distance of Dark Frames HQ in Sheffield, is just what the doctor ordered. Of 95 well dressings in 2026, these are the ones I’ve identified with confirmed, or strongly suspected, scarecrows. The list isn’t definitive or exhaustive, and I’ll continue to update it as more cross my radar:
Endon, Staffordshire (23–25 May)
Litton, Derbyshire (20–29 June)
Tideswell, Derbyshire (20–29 June)
Crosspool, South Yorkshire (26 June–4 July)
Hope, Derbyshire (27 June–5 July)
Hoylandswaine, South Yorkshire (3–11 July)
Bamford, Derbyshire (11–19 July)
West Hallam, Derbyshire (11–19 July)
Tansley, Derbyshire (12–18 July)
Heath, Derbyshire (18–25 July)
Stoney Middleton, Derbyshire (25 July–2 August)
Barlow, Derbyshire (12–16 August)
The first of the 12 spinoff scarecrow events I found was in the substantial village of Endon, one of the few well dressings to take place outside of the Peak District proper (it’s in the Staffordshire Moorlands just outside Stoke-on-Trent), so on the blazingly hot Sunday of the late May Bank Holiday I hopped on the TransPenine Express to see what was what. In advance I’d downloaded a map of all 36 scarecrow locations generously prepared by the organising committee, although I found it challenging to interpret and slightly inaccurate, so I soon abandoned it in favour of a free-range and unguided scarecrow hunt.
Endon themes its scarecrow competitions, and this year’s motif was ‘Scarecrows Take a Break’. It could be argued that they know no other way of being (the menacing of birds being a generally sedentary activity), but ontological quibbles aside the villagers had risen brilliantly to the challenge, preparing a colourful cast of mannequins doing sports, playing musical instruments, and otherwise chillaxing, propped against fences and gateposts or looming out of bushes and hedgerows. They can be tricky photographic subjects, especially on a sunny day – light direction and shadow, backdrop, and of course the scarecrow itself all have to work together to create a pleasing frame – but here’s a selection of my favourites.
Finally, the obligatory postcard, here a hand-tinted example depicting Endon at around the turn of the twentieth century. It shows one of the wells that was dressed, and both the parish church and the Plough Hotel (now a Toby Carvery) had sprouted scarecrows.
