A Diary of Village Life So Far –

Finally pulling back the translucent lace half-curtains on what life in a small, very picturesque village in the North of England is really like: just pigeon fanciers, a truck full of fish, and a Prime Minister is all.

From the outside, villages look awfully quiet. One might assume boring even. But what I have discovered is that this is far from the truth. Life in a Small Picturesque North Yorkshire Village is full of regular events, interesting activities, surprises, and even deep intrigue.

I had sort of suspected this, based on some experiences from a long time ago when I resided in London for some years. Back then I regularly visited people in a small town in the far north of England, and was really surprised to discover that they had all sorts of small groups and clubs which met regularly. They were in this small sleepy town but they seemed surprisingly busy.

Celtic dancing. A vegetarian cooking club. Live music. Giant outdoor second-hand sales. The horse races. And the most interesting to me, the Collector’s Club, which hosted talks by local people who would share their individual collections of things. The Club had heard recent presentations about stamps; vintage ink pots; ceramic cows, pigs, elephants — these were individual collections; historical prints; model cars; items from the area’s industrial history. They would meet in a country pub or inn, and have drinks, dinner, and a presentation, in some order along those lines. The Club had been going for years, managing to find local people with collections of things, and also to invite people from a little further afield.

The Collector’s Club impressed me with the idea that people who live in small places maybe dream up their own kinds of entertainments. So that was my working hypothesis when I finally arrived here in Great Ayton.

Here is a sort of Diary of Village Life So Far.

A Saturday Afternoon in Great Ayton

It was the Village Fete! Games of Chance, Crafts, Cakes, Snacks, Beers and Ciders, Mocktails, Rides, Bouncy Castles, and the then-Prime Minister!

It was a breezy blue-sky day, with inflatable bouncy things for children looming and wobbling over the Village Green. I was trying very hard to win something at the many games of chance. Anything. I lost at the raffles. My tombola tickets got me nothing from the tables laden with prizes, if you had a matching number. The “Win A Bottle” tent promised ciders and Prosecco and wine, but all the bottles I won were filled with water. For which I’d just paid about six times the actual price.

I was really hoping for Champagne.

But at least all my money was going to various worthy local causes (the Quakers, the Nature group, Fair Trade, the Local Theatre, the Library, a Nursery School, the Mountain Rescuers, the Great Ayton Twinning Association). So much worthiness!

The then-Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, had just been to the Fete — I heard lots of people talking about his visit. I asked why Rishi Sunak had been here, of all places, and was informed: “Because he’s our MP!” This was news. I had assumed that, as this is pretty deep Tory/Conservative territory, we were represented by a Tory/Conservative Member of Parliament, but I had not been aware of who our MP was. Or that our MP was, at the time, the current Prime Minister.

Apparently the Prime Minister greeted many constituents at various tables and stalls on his visit, and indulged in a hearty game of Splat the Rat. This was all widely reported in the local media. These photos were in the Hambleton Today local area newspaper.

The Right Honourable Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of Great Britain, tries his hand at Splat The Rat at the Great Ayton Village Fete:

I was sorry to have missed that. Sorrier about that than the fact that I now had to lug home the 7 bottles of water I’d won.

A Monday Night in Great Ayton

“It’s amazing how many people aren’t aware of the Yorkshire Longsword dance tradition.”

Thus begins the website of the Great Ayton Leven Sword longsword dancing troupe, a group of spirited locals who practice and tour around in the summer months, playing music and dancing with swords. Leven Sword | Visit Great Ayton, North Yorkshire. At the end of a dance, they somehow thrust their swords into the middle of their moving circle, and someone raises them, now woven into a solid sword design, usually a 6-pointed star.

Which is admittedly kinda cool.

The Leven Sword dancers came to dance on the Village Green, which is right next to the River Leven, and you can bet I was there. They perform a type of Morris dancing but of a decidedly martial persuasion.

After the show of six old dances and two brand new ones, everyone headed to the Royal Oak Pub across the street, where the entire group settled in to play music and sing tunes for the rest of the evening. These are two different things, I learned in the course of the evening: “play music” means rousing singing by everyone who knows the song or can hum along, with people playing accordions, whistles, guitars, fiddles, and so on. “Sing tunes” is unaccompanied solo song, usually a folksy ballad and most often one about true love ending in complete disaster.

Apparently longsword dancing on the Village Green is a very old tradition, and the Leven Sword group is pointedly proud of having brought it back.

A Thursday in Great Ayton

If it’s Thursday, then it’s the Fresh Fish Truck! The Truck goes to Stokesley on Thursday mornings, and then it arrives in Great Ayton in the parking lot outside the hardware store – post office on Thursday afternoons at about 1 or 1:30 pm. I am a regular at the Fresh Fish Truck, having made a special effort to remember that, in Great Ayton, Thursdays = Fish.

Haddock, Scottish Salmon, Mackerel, Scottish Scallops, Cod, Tuna, Monkfish, Smoked Mackerel, and a bunch of other things from the sea. I am working my way through eating all of them, as I do like a bit of fish.

A Sunday in Great Ayton

I read that a chap called Ian would be drawing pictures in the Garden Allotments on Sunday late morning, and anyone who liked sketching could join him. Ian was giving free drawing tuition. He is an Urban Sketcher.

The Allotments are what we might in the USA refer to as Victory Gardens or a Community Garden. They are patches of garden which local people can sign up for, to grow some fruit, vegetables, flowers, and herbs. But I have never seen allotments in the USA the size of the ones in Great Ayton. Great Ayton offers huge gardening spaces.

So I wandered around for a while to admire the gardens. I took some pictures, and said “Hello” to all the chickens.

There are a lot of chickens.

These allotments are each large enough to have a shed or other structure, an array of furniture for sitting out with your thermos of tea and cheese-and-pickle sandwich, ample storage for all your tools, and even space for various types of greenhouses.

After you have wandered deep into the grounds for a bit, the Allotments go on for as long as you can see, in several directions.

I was not sure how I was going to find Ian the artist with his pad and pen. I had no idea what Ian even looked like. But I kept searching.

Which is how I came across the Great Ayton Pigeon Racing Club.

They are the Up North Combine of the North of England Homing Pigeon Union.

Unless they are the North of England Homing Pigeon Union of the Up North Combine. I am still pretty unclear about all that.

But they are definitely the Great Ayton Allotment Pigeon Racing Club!

They were a group of men in woollen sweaters and tweed flat caps, stomping their sturdy boots, and nervously awaiting the return of the first, second, third, and then all the 200+ pigeons who’d been racing that morning the 130 miles or so from Grantham in Lincolnshire back to Great Ayton in North Yorkshire.

“Grantham, that’s t’birthplace of Margaret Thatcher!” I was reminded by several club members in succession as they awaited their birds. “Aye, she were born there!” came the chorus each time from the rest.

They invited me to join them to wait for the birds. At that moment, I had absolutely nothing better to do.

It is an anxious-making thing really, gazing skyward to await your pigeons’ return from distant Grantham.

Several times the Werther’s Originals Hard Toffees were passed around and unwrapped. We sucked our sweets, hunched our shoulders, adjusted our flatcaps, and squinted at the sky.

No pigeons.

A nice sky, though, and a lot of really good clouds.

But still no pigeons.

Just sky.

And then…

THE FIRST PIGEON, THE WINNER OF THE RACE, ARRIVES!

A PIGEON! It’s such an exciting moment! And then there are more!

More and more pigeons! Who knew pigeon arrival could be so thrilling? There was cheering, and the throwing in the air of tweedy hats and caps!

The pigeons all do some noisy victory laps overhead, singing loudly, before they head back into their respective pigeon house in the Allotments. Above are pigeons from the team of the winning pigeon, ready to head into their wee pigeon house there on the right. After a bit of a rest, they each get some sort of pigeon treat.

It was a very successful race, with a clear winner, and everyone getting to eat a bunch of toffees. It did not pour with rain. The lorry/truck arrived back from Grantham right as scheduled with all the transport baskets for the pigeons to be packed into the next time they go racing.

These special pigeon baskets get put away in one of the shared pigeon club huts till the next exciting competition.

The Club said that I have a standing invitation to return any Sunday for a race, and they gave me a copy of their Official Handbook so I can study up on the rules and statistics. It’s an Official Handbook from 2021, but I was assured that I can still refer to it since “nowt changes much” in the world of pigeon-racing regulations.

That’s 172 pages of rules, bylaws, race results, and pigeon pictures. You can read all about your favorite racing pigeons and study their eyeballs.

I will be back again this Sunday for the Great Ayton pigeon race, you can be sure! Aye, as sure as Margaret Thatcher were born in Grantham!

Then who should arrive but Ian, the artist! The pigeon racers pointed him out to me, noting that the approaching gentleman was carrying a pad and pen. So I introduced myself, and we headed off to draw one of the local gardeners in his allotment. There I sampled some early-season ripe raspberries and strawberries, and then embarked on a mediocre but most well-intentioned sketch.

I know. The likeness is uncanny! Ian’s advice included the importance of lining up the elements across a single horizontal in the frame, and not including things that extend out of the frame. This urban sketching business is challenging work.

Ian completed his drawing, and I ate more strawberries. He leads urban-sketching sessions in nearby Stokesley village on a Tuesday, and in Great Ayton each Wednesday, and sometimes he organizes group sketching excursions to events all over North Yorkshire.

Ian gave me a lift over to the Great Ayton Cricket Club, as I wanted to see if there was a game on, and we said goodbye till the next urban sketching session. I walked up along the field, but the match had sadly been cancelled due to the threat of rain that Sunday, and so the Cricket Club and all the bars and snack stands were closed. I strolled back towards the Village Green to go see the Captain Cook Museum and get an ice cream.

Surprise!

A surprise is the entire Village Green one morning covered in tractors. It was some sort of huge Tractor Show, featuring a huge number of tractors. And people who own tractors. And people who like to look at tractors.

Intrigue

I am not exactly sure where the scandal lies here, but recently the owners of the land underneath the Garden Allotments decided to sell it off to developers. The developers would then build a bunch of houses there. The gardeners, chicken keepers, pigeon racers, and others who support keeping the Allotments formed a group to fundraise to buy the land themselves and save the Allotments.

They did manage to raise over £ 50,000, although the owners want some £ 300,000, but the group can now apply for some kind of government co-funding to continue their efforts.

The scandal arose on a local Facebook page, when pro-Allotment people claimed their pro-Allotment posts were being taken down. I have no idea what is behind all of this, but the discussion did get mighty fierce for a while, and some strongly critical statements were slung in both directions.

I support the Allotments, so to help the work to purchase the land I have been buying raffle tickets from the Hospice-Supporting Charity Shop in Great Ayton each week. My plan is that if I win the pot of some £ 8000 I will donate it all to the fund to buy the Allotments.

I am hoping I have better luck than the Village Fete Day when all I won was very expensive water.

Wednesday Quiz Night Sometimes In Great Ayton

The Quiz Night is a long-standing event held every fortnight/ two weeks in someone’s home, on a Wednesday. The home can be in Great Ayton or elsewhere. If it is elsewhere someone from Great Ayton gives the four or five of us a ride. There are drinks and snacks, and we play a card game called “2s, 8s, and Jacks,” a round of Trivial Pursuit Mastermind Edition, and then a card game called “Contract Whist.” I had never heard of these card games before, and now I can share that I have come in second in each. I am not yet a true threat in Contract Whist, but I sure am working on it.

And that’s a typical week here in the picturesque North Yorkshire Town of Great Ayton. Where it seems there is really a lot going on, all the time. Who’d have thought it?

Now with added crayon!