Hurrah! The Nantwich Show lives again. The rain fell but it didn’t prove a washout this year. We bring you pictures of the highlights

here comes the rain again. Yes, the Nantwich Show – cancelled last year amid torrential downpours – went ahead this year, but with a good sprinkling of rain on Dorfold Park.

The brollies came out, the defiant spirit needed to endure a typical English summer was deployed and many thousands had a jolly good time.

‘We carried on regardless,’ says show secretary Adrian Lawrence. ‘Luckily the ground condition was perfect. The field has been grazed by sheep for several years. We’ve got a good base layer so we weren’t up to our knees in mud. It was just a bit of a miserable morning. It was just disappointing that people could not sit out in the enclosures and have a drink and eat and see what was going on.’

Anticipation of the 2013 show was the highest it has ever been, with record entries in many show classes such as horticulture. That was perhaps because of the disappointment of last year, when the Cheese Show went ahead, but the main show did not.

It was all-systems go – if a little damp - in 2013. There were shire horses on display, a parade by the Cheshire Beagles, sheep-shearing demonstrations and judging of all manner of beasts, hooved, furred and feathered.

There were falconry displays from North Wales-based Terry Large, with 19 raptors, the biggest of them a European eagle owl.

And in the very popular fruit and vegetable competitions, there were onions the size of footballs, gooseberries, redcurrants and raspberries arranged like works of art, cabbages like unfurled green umbrellas and plum tomatoes so red and ripe you had to stop yourself picking them up from the display tables and popping them into your mouth.

Vintage tractors chugged around for our amusement, and quad bike stunt ace the Kangaroo Kid defied the slippery conditions to put on a thrilling show in the main arena.

Of course, it would have been a sunnier Nantwich Show had it had been held a month earlier. Have the organisers ever considered changing the date? Apparently not.

‘It’s been the same date for the whole of its history – the last Wednesday in July,’ says Adrian. ‘It would be Sod’s Law for us to move it to June and find it rained in June and July would be lovely.’