Hats off to this children’s plaything from bygone days

Bundle up your jumpers because we need some goalposts. It’s time for a massive explosion of childhood nostalgia because – joy of joys – the Witch’s Hat is back. I was chortling like a small boy with a fresh packet of Spangles (and, as usual, failing to engage the interest of my own children in my parental nonsense) when I read this important news. This is bigger than when they rediscover lost episodes of Doctor Who. The best part of the playground will salute the skies again!

You may ask: what are you banging on about? That’s good, because I’m going to tell you unless, like so many readers of the Monday Courier, you have already realised I’m burbling again and it’s not worth your time.

Well, a Witch’s Hat is a 12ft pole with a conical

frame atop it, and the potential to swing around randomly in a frightening way. It’s pretty great.

As I discovered while a snot-nosed brat playing on a Witch’s Hat in King George V Park in Cambusbarron, near Stirling, the best way to experience one is in the company of other snot-nosed brats. That’s because you could push it back and forward quite violently, causing the cone to clang loudly into the pole and everybody’s teeth to rattle. It was utterly brilliant.

Sadly, the return of the Witch’s Hat does not include this experience. Its redesigned version, created for a heritage project in Kettering, Northamptonshire, includes a mechanism that keeps everything spinning but avoids violent contact with the pole.

According to the Children’s Play Advisory Service, the original Witch’s Hats were removed in the 1980s because they “had a high risk of inflicting lethal injury”, which I must grudgingly accept.

Anyway, it may be a sanitised version but I’m still happy, As a large, middle-aged man, I know it’s unlikely I will find myself aboard a Witch’s Hat, even if its return spreads beyond the recreation by Wicksteed Playground, the company founded by the ride’s inventor, Charles Wicksteed, almost a century ago. But I’m so happy to know Witch’s Hats are on offer to a new generation.

Spangles were horrible, though. Let’s admit that.

The best part of the playground will salute the skies once again!