After the rain of 2004, this year saw a return to a dry and mainly sunny weekend for the 2005 Scarecrow Trail and Summer Fayre. The village was as busy as ever for this highlight of the annual calendar, and although the absolute number of scarecrows was down slightly on previous years, the standard was if anything even higher, both in the originality of the themes and the quality of constuction.

This year saw a very clear winner in the popular vote for the best scarecrow, with about a third of all votes cast. This was of course the superb "Camping Capers", highlighting the antics going on at "Oakfield 'Oliday Camp". It is virtually impossible to capture in one photograph, but the computer created composite below gives an idea of the scale of the display (the layout is actually straight - the curvature is an artifact caused by panning the camera).

More votes than ever before were cast this year, and the full list of prize-winners is given below:

First:

#46, Camping Capers, by Jan, Nik, Kath and Gerald

Second:

#44, Palmers in the Privvy, by Maxine Davies

Third:

#50, Birds of Pray, by the Johnson family

Camping Capers

The following scarecrows (in alphabetical order) also received a significant number of votes

#6, Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head
#73, Scooby Doo
#12, Scooby Doo, Where Are You?
#76, "Sugarlumps" said Dougal!
#3, The Royal Wee
#58, The Wicked Witch of the West
#72, Thunderbirds 'R' Crow!
#70, V.E. Day

Congratulations and heartfelt thanks once more to everybody who made a scarecrow - without your wonderful efforts there would be no trail. Regretfully, there was some mindless vandalism of scarecrows this year, and a particular thank you goes to those who replaced damaged or stolen scarecrows so quickly. It is understood that Cheshire Police have already made one arrest.

All 140 scarecrow photos are available below. This includes a considerable number of additional scarecrows that were not entered for the event, so were not in the event guide. Images are relatively highly compressed, to minimise download time while still maintaining acceptable quality.

We have broken the scarecrow listing down into several pages, following the maps in the printed scarecrow programme. This stops any one page taking too long to download. Click below on the section you are interested in:

Wrenbury Village Centre - Shop to St. Margaret's Hall and The Green (1 - 28)
Wrenbury (continued) - Nantwich Road (Shop to School) and Pinsley View (29 - 39)
Wrenbury (continued) - Sandfield Avenue, Sandfield Court, Oakfield Avenue and Oakfield Close (40 - 59)
Wrenbury (continued) - School grounds, Nantwich Road (east of the school) and Station Road (60 - 75)
Wrenbury Heath (76 - 86)
Aston (87 - 98)
Canal Area - Pubs, Canal and Frith Lane (99 - 104)

If a scarecrow is missing, it was not available when the photographs were taken. If you have a picture of it, we would be delighted to hear from you.