The sky over Rushcliffe Country Park was full of an amazing range of brightly coloured kites on September 1st as the Kite Festival was revived once again. On a gloriously sunny and quite windy Sunday, Rushcliffe Country Park was host to hundreds of local families and visitors from further afield, who all came along to watch the amazing display of kite flying by members of the Midland Kite Fliers Club and to also have a chance to fly their own kites, or ones they made themselves with support from Barbara Breakwell and members of the Parish Council Events team and resources supplied by the Rushcliffe Play Forum.
The Midland Kite Fliers all arrived full of enthusiasm and promptly at 12.00 flew their amazing range of huge kites, including a giant scuba diver, a shark, superman, butterflies, a bi-plane along with various multi coloured stunt kites. As the public began to join in, lots of smaller kites joined in the fun, unfortunately at least one escaped from it’s owner, but did get caught up on a tree next the kite field and continued to fly for the rest of the afternoon on it’s own! It may still be there!
Rushcliffe Play Forum kindly donated supplies to make kites, so from 12 till 4pm there was a constant queue of enthusiastic children all waiting to make their own kites, following a pattern donated by the Midland Kite Fliers Club and looking up at the skies most of these proved successful at flying too. The village mascot, Ruddy Duck, made a trip to the park to see the kites and was mobbed by lots of local children all wanting to say hello and have their pictures taken with him, so much so he didn’t even get to fly a kite himself!
One of the professional kite fliers described the day as “a thoroughly epic event” and the first time in a decade so many kites had been flying over Nottingham at the same time, and there was also a comment from one of the park rangers that it was the busiest the park had been all year. As the events team packed away it was great to see so many people still enjoying the late summer weather and fun of flying their own kites.
A huge thank you to Barbara Breakwell (who suggested the one-off revival) and the Rushcliffe Play Forum, along with the park rangers and parish council staff who helped moved equipment to/from the site and the Events Team for their hard work on the day. The Events Team are now looking forward to their next event, Ruddington Xmas Fayre on Saturday 7th December 12 – 5pm. Watch out for more details here and on follow us on Facebook @RuddPCEvents and Twitter @RuddFayre for more information.