Marchington village festival adds falconry display to 10th anniversary weekend

Marchington Festival marked its 10th year by putting a falconry display outside the marquee, turning bird-of-prey work into part of a village weekend built for families as much as insiders. The display sat on the children’s activities list alongside face painting, giant games and ride-on tractors, which made its role plain: this was a public-facing attraction, not a specialist meet.

The festival ran from Friday, June 19 through Sunday, June 21, 2026, and the wider programme stretched across Marchington’s church, village hall, tennis courts, cricket ground and playing fields. Alongside the falconry slot, the village offered open gardens, a scarecrow competition, an art exhibition, a Sunday service, an artisan food and drink market, a classic and military vehicle display, a daft dog show and a mini zoo. In other words, the birds were one stop in a packed rural weekend, not the main event.

That placement suited the way Marchington Festival has grown. The event was established in 2015, and the open gardens were where it all started, after the board of directors at Marchington Community Shop looked for a way to keep the shop financially sustainable. The festival says the weekend remains mainly volunteer-run, and it still leans on year-round fund-raising, sponsorship and the sort of local labour that keeps village events from collapsing under their own logistics.

The 2026 open-gardens listing named 13 gardens and offered a free shuttle bus, while the festival’s parking guidance directed visitors to the free official car park on Silver Lane festival field next to the marquee, with disabled parking at the village hall and a free hop-on, hop-off courtesy bus for the garden tour. Marchington Community Shop said it was open from 8.30am to 4.15pm on both festival days, a useful reminder that the event was designed to spread footfall through the village economy, not just into one field.

For falconry people, the more interesting point was not that Marchington added birds of prey, but how it framed them. The Hawk Board says raptor displays should educate the public, with conservation and welfare at the centre, and the British Falconers’ Club, founded in 1927, bills itself as the UK’s largest falconry club. Marchington did not name the exhibitor, the species on show or the demo format, but the setup was clear enough: a family festival used falconry as an accessible hook, the kind that can draw a casual crowd into the wider discipline.