All Fools Day on April 1st seems to have taken a back seat in recent years, maybe because there is so much alternative entertainment available now on TV and via the various web diversions the IT buff can tap into. Tourists on a Wales holiday a few years ago could have turned on the goggle-box or the radio and been taken in by a news item referring to some outlandish happening, which quickly became evident as a scam.
The same applied to the local newspapers and the Wales holiday visitor would have seen some ingenious tricks played out on April 1st.
Some years ago BBC Radio Wales conned large numbers of listeners with a report that seagulls in the area were being deceived by the large areas of plastic laid by potato farmers as a protective cover over their crops. These polythene frost-beaters, which also served as cold frames to warm up the soil, sometimes covered acres of ground. and to Wales holiday visitors and locals alike they looked from a distance like sheets of water.
The scam was that seagulls in their hundreds were settling on them trying to swim, for many of the early potato farms were around the relatively frost-free coastal belt.
Another scam pulled off by the local paper was the alleged discovery of a disused treacle factory which was being examined by archaeologists in South Pembrokeshire. Then there was a hoax in the same paper, which fooled some Wales holiday visitors and many locals, that a sunken galleon had been discovered in a deep pool in Treffgarne Quarry near Haverfordwest. It was not until the victims realised the quarry was so far inland that the idea was ridiculous that it dawned on the more gullible that the paper was dated April 1st. Older folk may recall a stunt pulled on nationwide TV a few years ago reporting very convincingly on a Spaghetti Farm in Italy, with interviews in the Spaghetti Grove where strings of pasta were hanging festooned from the Spaghetti trees. There was another stunt, famous now in the annals of TV, about silks being produced in Mulberry Plantations where the silk worms had been taught to weave. Few people, including those on a Wales holiday, are so gullible these days, as they fed on a diet of Dr Who and other fantastic fare which makes them too cynical to be caught by an April Fool scam.
Visit Bluestone to know more about Pembrokeshire holidays.
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