The demise of that once mighty rural dweller ... The scarecrow

Passing through Mayo in the wake of the election of another farmer to the Dáil (Michael Fitzmaurice in Roscommon South Leitrim), dammit if I did not spot a single and solitary and haggard scarecrow, skulking in the corner of a vegetable plot on the outskirts of Charlestown.

He looked lost and lonesome and miserable, stooping down over what looked like the remains of a row of scrawny cabbages, and he was not doing his job either, because there was a solitary magpie, two crows, a blackbird and a rake of smaller birds feeding away in the garden he was supposed to be in charge of.

He was hatless and he had no britches, and only one bare leg, and his head was nothing more than a plastic bag loosely stuffed with a wisp of dead rushes.