Fustrated at the state of the roads in his village, a resident decided to stick two proverbial… legs up at his council for their failure to tackle the potholes they are riddled with.
James Coxall highlighted the problem by putting a fake pair of pins in the largest crater, making it look as if someone had fallen in head-first and got stuck.
The carpenter, from Castle Camps in Cambridgeshire, took action after waiting eight months for the 3ft-wide and four-inch-deep hole to be fixed.
He enlisted the help of his wife Katrina and their three children on Sunday to stuff rags into an old pair of jeans before wedging some colourful trainers on the bottom – or top, depending on how you look at it.
‘We’ve driven past the pothole and kept meaning to do something with it,’ Mr Coxall said.
‘I had two bits of wood left over and we put the jeans on them, stuffed them with old rags and put two of the kids’ old shoes on top.’
James Coxall highlighted the problem by putting a fake pair of pins in the largest crater, making it look as if someone had fallen in head-first and got stuck
The carpenter, from Castle Camps in Cambridgeshire, took action after waiting eight months for the 3ft-wide and four-inch-deep hole to be fixed
The kids biked down there with me and we put a brick down to keep it upright.
‘People have found it amusing and asked me if it was [done by] me. They’ve been taking photos and putting them on Facebook. It’s a bit of fun.’
Mr Coxall, 41, said Cambridgeshire County Council had been out to fix some potholes in the past but the roads in the area remained ‘bad’.
The pothole he used for his eye-catching protest was so large that if there was an oncoming vehicle you would ‘have to either stop or hit the pothole’.
‘They need to come out and do them properly. Whenever they do a repair, it never seems to last,’ he said.A photo of the legs appeared on Facebook page Odd Things Around Cambridge, where one person wrote: ‘They fix, then repair 12 months later and so on… mind and budget blowing.’
Another compared it to the classic scene in the Vicar of Dibley where Dawn French jumps into what she thinks is a puddle, only to disappear up to her neck.
The stunt appears to have turned things on their head at the council, at least, as a spokesman said arrangements had now been made to ‘inspect the whole road and repairs will be made as required’.
