Building and Burning The Wickerman 2011

The Wickerman Festival is not on the same scale as T in the Park (Scotland's most famous music festival), but it does have 2 distinct advantages over other, larger music festivals. The first is it’s less than 15 miles away, and the second is it has a giant willow sculpture that goes up in flames at midnight on the Saturday.

And it is damned impressive both before and after it does.

Because I know Trevor Leat, one of the sculptors of The Wickerman (built by leatrigg.com), last year I popped out one day during the building of it to take photos (see - Building The Wickerman), then went along to the festival and took photos of it burning down (see - Burning The Wickerman).

This year we planned it a bit more and I went out on site half a dozen times so I could create a sequence of photos showing it being built at several different stages.

The steel frame was still in place from last year’s sculpture, but they repositioned the arms, removed the bow and this year added antlers to create a stag-headed man design.

Below are a few taster photos of the complete sequence, which can be found by following the links at the end of this post to my Facebook or Flickr albums.

As always, feel free to click on any of the images for larger versions.



Starting at the bottom of last year's frame and working upwards


The arms are repositioned


The scaffolding gets higher


The brave photographer scales the scaffolding to see the head being built.


Admiring festival goers give the completed sculpture a sense of scale


One food stall taking full advantage of bonus publicity...


Going up in flames


Because of the direction of the wind, one arm and one antler remain long after the rest has burned away


Links:

The full set of images on Facebook
The full set of images on Flickr

Trevor Leat's website
Alex Rigg's website
Leat-Rigg website