Blue gnomes at the centre of a five-year row have finally been removed from a roundabout after they were repeatedly and brutally attacked.

The ornaments, which were each around three-feet-high, were installed in 2011 in an attempt to brighten up what is a rather dull road junction in Totnes, Exeter.

But the ugly, Snow White-themed gnomes soon became the target of the town’s loathing.

Although some saw them as a ‘bit of fun’ and would earnestly defend them, most people (naturally) thought they were tacky, and accused the gnomes of turning the town into a ‘Westcountry Disneyland’.

In fact they have reportedly been attacked with rocks, picked up and violently hurled to the ground, and apparently even kidnapped.

Four of them even disappeared completely, never to be seen again.

‘They got so badly beaten up and attacked by people who had probably had a bit to drink, they ended up in a bit of a sorry state,’ Vernon Gaye, head of China Blue, said.

‘The idea had always been that they would fade into the background as the plants grew and people would be able to just catch a glimpse of them as they drove by, and wonder what they had just seen.

‘But they have continued to get beaten up and some literally had rocks bashed at them.’

Diana Cusack from Totnes Gardens, which looks after the planting on the roundabout, added: ‘The gnomes were being hammered to death by people who would go there on a Saturday night and just bash them.

‘They were not left in a gnome-like state and they had lost their blueness.’

Source:
courtesy of METRO

by Ashitha Nagesh

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