![](https://www.hicklingnottslocalhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/BA-weekend-flyer-1-120124-724x1024.jpg)
Belvoir Angels Weekend – 18th & 19th May
![](https://www.hicklingnottslocalhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/BA-weekend-flyer-1-120124-724x1024.jpg)
Thank you to everyone for the interest you have shown in our work on our local history and specifically on Hickling and our neighbouring villages. We tend to get a little bogged down in all the things that we still need to do or which we have started and not finished. The ‘to do’ list pages are well in to double-figures and I’m very conscious that there are things we really want to be getting through more quickly – my apologies if your information or enquiry is still on the list, we haven’t forgotten you.
2023 – it’s been a busy one
We are incredibly grateful to Hickling Parish Council and the Scarecrow Festival Committee who donate very generously to our group and ensure that we can keep the website going year-on-year (it costs between £250 and £350 a year to keep it online, all the research and maintenance is done by volunteers). In addition, Carol, Pauline and their team work really hard at village events fundraising for our projects – thank you!!
2024 – here goes …
Lest We Forget.
In 2018 the village took part in the national ‘There But Not There’ commemorations marking the 100th anniversary of the Armistice at the end of World War I.
Now, more than ever, the need to find peaceful solutions to conflict, to seek out ways to live with our differences, and to show tolerance and understanding, is dominating our everyday thoughts.
The Tommy figure stands in the Churchyard all year round and the 11 silhouettes are now in place, inside the Church, for the period of Remembrance.
THE STILTON CHALLENGE—can you do it?!
Hickling cows = Long Clawson Stilton Cheese
Can you tell the difference between Long Clawson Stilton and the local rivals from Cropwell Bishop & Colston Bassett?
50p-a-go
All correct answers will go in the hat to win a delicious Long Clawson Dairy Hamper
Tuesday 31st October 5pm-8pm
We look forward to welcoming you to our 2nd quarterly local history gathering at the Plough Inn on Tuesday 31st October 5pm-8pm – these are drop-in suggestions (no fixed agenda) just an opportunity to chat and explore! This time we’re focusing on our farming heritage but we welcome everyone and anything ‘local history’!
The Hickling Women’s Institute was first formed in February 1935 but it took a break in 1940 during WWII and, sadly, no records survive from these first years. Since the WI was reformed in 1947 meticulous records have been kept – their repository, a rather battered old suitcase.
A project of this sort is a big commitment for the local history group: 2 years on the waiting list, 2 weeks blocked out, 60 hours of work and almost 5,000 scanned images – hugely time-consuming but also incredibly rewarding.
The contents of the suitcase have now been scanned and archived and the originals returned to the WI. It is hoped that a member of the WI will take on the challenge of assembling the story of the Hickling WI from these fascinating documents; in the meantime a selection can be found in new galleries (click here).
Many of these records are very candid and contain a treasure trove of anecdotes, detail and records – they record the work of the extraordinary women who have worked with and campaigned for the WI over the last 90 years. If this is a project that you would be interested in, please contact us!
Goodness – what an evening!
We put out 50 chairs and needed twenty more; many thanks to everyone who supported the event!!
Our speaker, Emily Gillott was lovely, lively and passionate – thought-provoking (but I didn’t manage to get a photo of her …).
‘Fields in the Landscape’ showed us how to spot periods of landscape change from our travels but also using online resources free to us all and from the comfort of an armchair. Then she took us on a timeline through the changes in our landscape from the palaeolithics who began by pruning trees to improve fruit-yield or clearing glades to encourage deer into easier hunting positions. Through the earliest farming settlements (still visible in Cornwall and the Scottish Isles, for example) to the Romans who used the Trent Valley as a bread basket to feed their empire but who left, leaving the landscape to over-grow their presence. Then we travelled up to and beyond the mediaeval open field systems and self-sufficient communities before the cataclysmic changes brought by the Enclosure Acts of the late 1700s, population movement and industrialisation. We are in a period of change again – how do we learn from the mediaeval systems and the problems created by enclosure? What a story.
Newspaper articles have been added to the Scarecrows main page showing the original Mr & Mrs Straw who were created by Roger and Davina Walker of Fox & Hounds Farm on Hickling Pastures in October 1996!
Our scarecrow pages have been updated to include photographs, winners and the answers for the Hickling Scarecrow Festival 2023. We also have videos of the Hurricane & Spitfire flypast and a vintage car drive-thru.
If you have any photographs that you would like to share, please contact us through the website or through our FB page.
You can also follow the official Hickling Scarecrow Festival through their Facebook page.
Fields in the Landscape
By Emily Gillott
(Notts County Council Archaeologist)
Hickling Village Hall
September 22nd 7.30pm – please email us to reserve your tickets in advance.
“The talk will be about how clues to the past are hiding in plain sight, and in the most seemingly mundane things, all around us. We’ll take a look at how the shape and layout of fields can help us look into the past using maps, aerial photos, and Lidar, all from the cosy comfort of your armchair and laptop. It might also help you see the landscape in a different light when you’re out and about too!”