# Wicker Man's leg-lopping mystery



## Johnny Thunder (Feb 24, 2006)

* Wicker Man's leg-lopping mystery*

A Galloway landmark left by a cult 1970s movie has been chopped down.

Wooden legs from a figure set alight in the final scenes of The Wicker Man had remained in their concrete bases at Burrowhead for some 30 years.
Investigations have started after the legs - standing about 5ft high - were sawn down and removed, leaving two stumps in the ground.

The site is now on a holiday village run by Stuart Fairclough, who said the landmark was a popular attraction. "I got phone calls at the start of the week saying 'do you realise that the stumps have gone'?" he said. "It would seem to be at the latter end of last week and apart from that we are all in the dark." He added that in his three years running the holiday village he had received hundreds of inquiries about the legs.

Dumfries-based film historian Mark McLachlan said the movie did have some passionate fans. "Over the last 10 years the Wicker Man has had a second life," he said. "It has spawned a remake and the Wickerman festival."

He said it was not impossible that somebody wanted to have a permanent memento from the film. "I suppose it is owning a piece of film history," he said. "But to come all this way to steal two stumps of wood is madness."
However, he said that there was a community of Wicker Man fans.

"You see it online, you see it at film festivals, you see it at the festival down here," he said. "The film has many fans who do very many strange things."
He called upon the local council and other groups to help come up with a plan to replace the missing legs.

"I think this will have an effect, not only on the holiday village, it is the image of the Wicker Man and its place in Dumfries and Galloway," he said.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/scotland/south_of_scotland/6176828.stm

Published: 2006/11/23 15:44:05 GMT


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