Didcot Wanderings on The East Hagbourne Scarecrow Trail

Meeting Crow Farah and Florence Nighting-Bale on the East Hagbourne Scarecrow Trail

Scarecrows, as their name suggests, are designed to stand in farmers’ fields to scare away crows and other birds from eating the newly planted seeds and tender young plants. A scarecrow is usually dressed in the farmer’s old clothes which are stuffed with straw with the intention of making it look like a human. In East Hagbourne this it taken to a whole new level in late May and early June when the village is taken over by numerous scarecrows (what is the collective noun for a group of scarecrows?!), but these ones are generally friendly, often funny and even satirical and these are designed to attract rather than scare away. This is the East Hagbourne Scarecrow Trail, an annual event that started in 2005, organized by members of the local community. Its popularity has since grown for both participants and visitors alike and in 2026 there were 36 scarecrows around the village.

The idea is simple. Each year there is a different theme for the scarecrow designs. All residents of East Hagbourne can enter a scarecrow and there are prizes for the best ones. The scarecrows are then displayed in the front gardens of the houses of the participants. A map, with a list of all the scarecrows and their addresses, plus a voting slip for visitors to vote for their favourite scarecrow, is printed on a leaflet which visitors can purchase for £1 from the village community shop, the Fleur de Lys pub or, on Sunday afternoons, from St Andrew’s Church (when tea and cake is served on the Sundays of the trail) and then use it as a self-guided tour around the trail. All the money raised from the sale of the map goes to charity (in 2026 the chosen charities were Oxfordshire Wildlife Rescue and WaterAid).

I went on the last weekend of the trail before the scarecrows were put to bed for the rest of the year and found myself coming across several other people who were walking around the village with maps in hand. The 2026 theme was ‘Historical Figures’ and there was no shortage of artistic ingenuity, with scarecrows that had names that were a play on words, such as Crow Farah, Florence Nighting-Bale, Roger Banni-straw and Nacrowleon Bonaparte and tableaux where the scarecrows were arranged within a scene, including the depiction of Leonardo Da Vinci and his famous painting ‘The Last Supper’, Florence Nightingale standing next to a bed containing an injured patient, Captain Matthew Webb swimming along the top of a hedge, and Henry VIII with a beheaded queen lying next to him. It’s village life at its best!

The route covers the whole of the village, but unfortunately it isn’t a circular one, so I needed to work out a plan that avoided too much doubling back, but ensured that I would finish at the Fleur de Lys for a much-needed drink while I voted on my favourite scarecrow.