Sun sets on village day...

12:03pm Thursday 15th May 2008

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A 50-YEAR-OLD village tradition has been scrapped because so few people want to help organise it.

Organisers, some of whom are now in their 70s, say last year's Allostock Field Day was the last.

This year they intend to run a scaled-down event for children instead.

"It was a very difficult decision and very sad," said Eunice Driffield who had helped to organise the village fete for 40 years "But people are very busy and they don't always want to get involved in things."

Last week in an email to the Knutsford Guardian, committee chairman Alison Owens appealed for more villagers to get involved.

"Everyone works very hard," she said.

"But it is too easy to become involved in an insular world, living behind tall fences and gates, never making contact with others around you, and finding that your free time is regulated by the timing of a television programme or the involvement of a computer screen."

Last year more than 400 people enjoyed the 50th Allostock Field Day.

But the committee struggled to organise - and run - the festival.

Members spent days working on the project and after the event they did not leave the site until about midnight.

"We just felt it was getting to be too much for us," said Mrs Driffield.

Mrs Driffield, who got involved when her grown-up children were young, remembers the village queen being wheeled through the streets in a milk cart. Hundreds of villagers used to line the route to watch the procession through Allostock.

That tradition was scrapped in the mid-1970s but the events on the field continued each year.

They included several stalls, a dog show, displays in the main ring and a fancy dress competition.

But the event also suffered when the village's primary school was closed, forcing children to travel to Byley and Lower Peover.

"There wasn't the same interest then," said Mrs Driffield.