Wednesday 6 June 2012

Littleton Jubilee Weekend

The village where we live has a fantastic community spirit to it (one of the reasons we moved here) and that was very much in evidence for the Jubilee weekend.  A team of volunteers had arranged a full program of activities over the 4 days.

Saturday morning the fun started as people placed their scarecrows in position for the royal themed scarecrow competition.  In total there were 33 entries including 2 from our family.

 Carol and Alice did one of King Alfred 11 - Who burnt the cakes?
and I helped Helen to make a balcony for her display.20 - The Balcony

It was great to wander around the village seeing all of the scarecrows that had been created.   There is a prize for the best ones so there were also score cards to be completed and debate about the relative merits of each one - do you give points for neatness or deduct marks if you can't see straw?    We also got to chat with a lot of friends and neighbours as we spotted them outside our house judging ours.

On the Saturday morning there was a set of walks around part of the parish boundary.  Carol and I did a 6.5 or so mile walk (you can see where we walked - here - it was a circular route, the gap just after the 2 mile mark was down to the pause button getting pressed on the phone ......)  which coincidentally passed by the site of 3 geocaches we hadn't found before so we were able to bag those as we passed.  

In total around 250 people took part in either this walk or a shorter one that day.

Monday there was a children's activity afternoon and then in the evening a mass picnic on the recreation ground.

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 I'm told there were around 800 tickets sold for that !  The organisers definitely picked the best day for this - we had lovely sunshine and dry conditions for the picnic and enjoyed dancing on the grass to the live band.
Live music from the Jubilee Band

At around 10:15 a beacon was lit on the adjoining MOD land of the Winchester Training Regiment - I'm not sure what they used but it certainly started with an impressive whoosh !


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(I should add that it was behind the tree - it's just the angle of the photo that makes it look like the hedge is going up in smoke)

Some fireworks finished off the evening's entertainment other than the challenge of packing the picnic away and taking the gazebos down in the dark :-)

To finish things off on Tuesday there were 9 people opened their gardens for people to look round.  Sadly it rained pretty hard for most of the afternoon but Carol and I donned our wet weather gear and spent a couple of happy hours wandering around Littleton & Harestock being impressed by what others have done and feeling like we should lavish some more time and attention on ours!

I know who some of the organisers were but I'm sure there were many many unsung heros behind the scenes who made this weekend of celebration possible - my thanks to them all whoever they are.

More pictures from the weekend can be found in my Littleton Jubilee Weekend Set on Flickr

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