Annabel could not promise that the scarecrows she had seen would be out today, as they sometimes hibernated, but she had high hopes that we might see them, if we were very quiet. If you are going to spot a pair of scarecrows in Norfolk or Suffolk, the part of the year we were now in – early spring – is as good a time to do so as any. Both of the Blaxhall scarecrows, a male and a female, used department store mannequins as their base and like all proper self-respecting mannequins were known to regularly change outfits, their preferences usually being clothes of a 1940s or 1950s vintage. Despite their local notoriety they were not the best-known instances of esoteric agricultural spookiness within the boundaries of Blaxhall. This distinction went to the Growing Stone at Stone Farm. Allegedly the stone was first excavated by a Blaxhall ploughman in the nineteenth century, at which point it was no bigger than two fists, but it has been expanding steadily ever since, to the extent that it has far surpassed liftability. Old Blaxhallians swear by this legend, although there is no photographic evidence of the stone’s diminutive childhood, nor of its adolescence, when, according to an old man from the village who spoke to the oral historian George Ewart Evans in the mid-1950s, ‘a cat could not walk under’ its now formidable lip. Arguably more than its alleged growth, what makes the stone eerie is that it stands alone in a part of the country that is anathema to big rocks. You could comb the whole of England and not find a less craggy place than here. Stones – flints specifically, the picking of which provided an important income for poverty-stricken villagers in the area before the metalling of roads began in the early twentieth century – are an important part of the terrain in Suffolk and the eastern half of Norfolk, but they are as a rule small, just like almost everything here except the sky. It is a countryside of sleepy waterways, geometric fields, gently rounded churches, satisfying meetings between stubble corridors and spirit-level horizons. If you return here after a long time away in a more vertiginous place, doing so can make you a peculiar kind of dizzy. I can’t quite compare the feeling to anything else in my own experience, but I imagine you’d get a similar sensation if, after living in a normal-size place, you were shrunk and given the chance to explore a model village for a weekend: maybe not shrunk really small so you were to scale with the houses and parks and shops, but reduced to perhaps the size of a hare or a young fox. Everything seems so soft and mild here, but to put it down solely to the flatness would be an error. Where East Anglia is at its flattest, from west Norfolk into north Cambridgeshire and south-east Lincolnshire, a distinctly harsh and unmild ambience is created. By contrast the delicately sloping fields of the rest of Norfolk and Suffolk can feel like a Trivial Pursuit Young Players’ Edition of the south-west of the UK, with hillocks taking the place of hills, and heaths functioning as bonsai moors. It is possible to be lulled into the erroneous belief that it is a place where nothing bad could ever happen.
There is a treachery to this place but it is a subtle treachery: the treachery of a dastardly hypnotist with a kind face. Scarecrows to me are a big part of this treachery: disorienting comedy humanoid figures redolent of death, shaking in deceptively flinty breezes on distant hazy cotton ridges. You see so many of them in these lowlands, and I don’t think it’s just because they have fewer places to hide. I hadn’t come to East Anglia looking for scarecrows, but they soon found me, as they would anyone who truly seeks to get to know the place on foot, which to my shame I did not until 2008, by which point I had been a resident of the region for almost seven years. That was three springs before I went to Blaxhall with Annabel, and in that time I had photographed over a hundred scarecrows, or mawkins, to use their old Norfolk name. Admittedly some of these were at village scarecrow festivals – such
