In the past couple of weeks, rainbows have been appearing in house windows all around Ruddington as ‘a sign of hope’ for patients and staff in hospitals across the country.
During the Coronavirus pandemic they’ve also become a powerful symbol for people wanting to show solidarity with – and support for – the many valued NHS workers on the front line. Residents at one house along Brookside Road have even painted a giant rainbow on their garage door (above) to make sure it couldn’t be missed! If you’ve children at home during the lockdown it’s certainly given them something both fun and positive to occupy them. But what to do next?
Well, canny residents on the outskirts of Ruddington have recently started employing a centuries’ old method of ‘frightening off’ contagious diseases – by constructing scarecrows and erecting them in front of their homes as a means of protection against COVID-19! These colourful characters, in many different guises, first starting appearing en masse this week along Old Road, off Landmere Lane, co-ordinated by residents Misia Smith and Jo McKenzie-Small. However, as Easter arrives, homemade scarecrows now seem to be popping up nearer the centre of our village, too.
Photographer Paul Reid used his period of permitted daily exercise today to snap as many of our new village scarecrows as possible – over a dozen – and kindly sent them to RUDDINGTON.info for the gallery below. (*Others have since been added thanks to additional contributors.)
Paul told us: “They are all amazing – and it shows great spirit! They just keep popping up – and it looks like it’s catching on, as I saw one on Loughborough Road just past Easthorpe Street as well.”
Villager Camilla Ash commented: “Thank you, Old Road. Your super cute scarecrows really made myself and my children smile on our walk today.”
If you’ve taken any further Ruddington scarecrow photographs, which you don’t mind sharing with us and everyone else, then please post them on social media using the hashtag #RuddingtonScarecrows. Thank you!
UPDATE 15th APRIL 2020*
A week on, Ruddington’s Old Road scarecrows were featured this lunchtime by Jo Healey on BBC East Midlands Today. Please click on the image below and press PLAY to watch her report (starts at 5’35” in)…
