The World Famous Loose Duck Race

The world famous Loose Duck Race is a good old-fashioned village fete. The Duck Race takes place along the Loose stream, in the beautiful village of Loose, near Maidstone.

As well as hundreds of yellow plastic ducks racing each other down the stream, there were children’s rides and games, coconut shy, rural crafts, homemade cakes in the tea tent, freshly cooked BBQ, street theatre and much more.

Tickets to bet on the 40 or 50 duck races went on sale at 1.00pm and the first race was at 2.00pm. Demand was huge and the queue for renting your duck at £2.00 for the race was snaked out of the field and up the hill nearly out of Loose altogether.  Although we were there well before 2pm the first race we could enter was the 4.34pm Duck number 37.  Ten minutes later and we would have been too late to rent a duck at all!  Like owning a racehorse, your duck does not live with you and is never in your possession.  Instead your yellow duck is trained and managed by the trainers, who in the case of slow moving ducks have to whip them into action.  Race Marshalls organise the getting of the ducks into the starting stalls and decide the winning duck for each race a quarter of a mile down stream.  The river bank is so crowded there is the constant threat of being pushed in.

This wonderfully eccentric typically English event needs to be on everyone’s yearly diary along with Glastonbury and the Last Night of the Prom’s.  We will be back next year. Definitely one for your Bucket list and not one to duck. It’s a bit like Alice in Wonderland meets Newmarket Races.  The scariest thing was how serious people were about racing plastic ducks down the river like an advanced version of Pooh sticks.