A Story from the Settle Flowerpot Festival
I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the Yorkshire Dales this year so far, so, I’ve crafted a little story inspired by Settle’s penchant for flamboyant flower pots. Enjoy.
In the crook of an old dry-stone wall, on the edge of Settle’s bustling village square, there lived a broken flower pot.
He wasn’t much to look at. His terracotta glaze had long since faded into a weary rust, one ear was chipped clean off, and a great crack ran jaggedly down his side like a lightning bolt made of sorrow. He had once been proud – perched on a windowsill brimming with petunias, singing with colour and dripping with summer – but that was years ago, before the fall.
Now he sat tilted and alone, used by no one, filled with nothing but the occasional crisp packet or wayward dandelion. During the cold months, children would scurry past and never notice him, and in the warmer ones, the better pots – the whole and handsome ones – were paraded through the town, painted and dressed as pirates, cows, Morris dancers, and cricket players for the Settle Flowerpot Festival.
“Oh look!” people would cheer, “It’s a family of flowerpot astronauts outside the butchers!”
“Oh how marvellous! That one’s a tea lady pushing a trolley!”
“Is that Alan Titchmarsh made entirely of clay pots and googly eyes?!”
But no one ever said, “Look at that broken one in the wall.”
And so the broken pot sulked quietly into himself, convinced his life was over, that he had been consigned to the great terracotta graveyard of yesterday’s usefulness. The world, he thought, belonged to the intact.
That is, until Mabel.
Mabel was six, and like most six-year-olds, had a heart large enough to encompass even the forgotten corners of the world. She spotted the pot one Wednesday morning while waiting for her mum outside the cheese shop.
“Why’s he sad?” she asked aloud, to no one in particular.
Her mum didn’t answer – she was busy comparing Wensleydales. But Mabel knelt down by the wall, and peered into the pot’s fractured little heart. And he, for the first time in many springs, felt seen.
The next day, she came back with a plan.
First came the googly eyes, stuck on either side of his crack like hopeful parentheses. Then a smile, painted in glitter glue – wonky but sincere. She stuffed his insides with compost and tucked a bold little marigold inside, like a sun being born. Finally, she crowned him with a tiny bowler hat made from the lid of a lost biscuit tin.
When the judges came that Saturday, they paused in their clipboard duties and stared.
“Is this…?”
“Yes,” said Mabel proudly, “He’s the Broken Flower Pot. But he still wanted to come to the festival.”
The judge – a woman who knew the value of mending more than replacing – smiled. “Then he’s just the kind of pot we need.”
They gave him a rosette for “Most Heart.”
And that summer, the broken flower pot became a bit of a local legend. People came not just to laugh at the silly ones, but to stand quietly by the old wall and smile at the marigold, still blooming defiantly from his crack.
Some said the flowerpot stood for all of us – the cracked, the dropped, the no-longer-quite-right – but who, with a bit of kindness and compost, could still be part of the story.
And the broken flower pot, for his part, never felt broken again.
Wording 