June 2008

Your letters

MAMMAL GROUP SEEKS YOUR HELP

Knowing where species are is a prerequisite to understanding their ecology and ensuring their conservation. The Yorkshire Mammal Group (YMG) is currently undertaking a survey of the distributions of all mammal species in North Yorkshire and urgently seeks more records, particularly from the western part of the county and the North York Moors.

I would like to enlist Dalesman readers’ help in three ways. First, records of mammal signs, eg molehills, or road kills (if they can be confidently identified) are welcomed and can be submitted on a form available from the YMG website (www.raysolve.co.uk/ymg)
or from me (details below).

Secondly, cats bring in a variety of mammalian prey but telling one species of shrew from another is often a problem.

To circumvent this, we are asking cat owners to digitally photograph their pet’s prey and to email the photograph to me for identification.

Finally, owls and kestrels are efficient samplers of local small mammal populations. So we are requesting up to half a dozen pellets from known roosts of these birds to be sent for examination (well wrapped in a jiffy bag). In all cases we need the name of the nearest village / town and either a postcode or six-figure map reference so that your records can be mapped. All help will be fully acknowledged and postage costs incurred sending pellets refunded.

Dr Geoff Oxford, Department of Biology (Area 18), University of York, PO Box 373, York YO10 5YW; tel 01904 328640; email: gso1@york.ac.uk

THE POET AND HAPPY CAMPER

My father-in-law, Harry Bairstow Hartley, died on 2nd January this year, aged ninety.

He attended Drummond Road School, winning a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School. During Harry’s schooldays he made several trips into the Dales, often involving camping.

As a schoolboy he lived for these trips — made under the auspices of the school’s own scout troop, which had a permanent camp at Drebley, near Appletreewick. Sometimes he would spend the whole summer holidays camping.

He would often tell us about these trips, particularly the before-breakfast dip in the Wharfe, taken whatever the weather. Inevitably, a deep love of the Dales developed.

In the last months of his life Harry wrote this ‘Ode to Yorkshire’ which he dedicated to Dickie Bird MBE, the famous cricketing umpire:

By its white rose emblem recognised
A symbol loved and greatly prized,
Westward bordered by the Pennines
A backbone formed in ancient times.
Resorts with boundless sandy beaches
Stand to form the eastern reaches,
Split profusely with river valley
Where weary folk and fauna dally.
Abundant with majestic hills,
Not far-fetched from satanic mills,
Hamlets, villages, cities and towns
Strategically sited in the downs.
Stately homes, cottages, castles and farms
All add on to the county’s charms,
Yorkshire, the county of my birth.
Yorkshire, the grandest place on earth.

Bob & Janet Avery, Carluke, Lanarkshire

THERE'S WARTIME SOUVENIRS…

The article on RAF Linton-on-Ouse (April) has galvanised me from a near eighty-eight-year sloth to write.

At the outbreak of the First World War my father joined the Royal Engineers as a corporal dispatch rider. Later he was gassed with chlorine but, fortunately, recovered and transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, forerunner of the RAF.

After obtaining his wings, he flew an aircraft in a unique squadron of Martinsides to be on active service. Originally based in Egypt, they moved to Salonika, Greece, from where they bombed and strafed retreating Turks trapped in the Struma Valley.

On Dad’s return home he brought a beautiful ten-foot mahogany propellor, acquired somehow from his aircraft, and from its markings the RAF have traced the aircraft it came from, as well as its history, which they gave to me.

The propellor always had an honoured place in our homes when we moved from Bradford to Otley, Ilkley and Pool-in-Wharfedale, where Dad died in 1983, aged ninety-two.

Too large for my modest home, I decided to offer it to RAF Church Fenton. It was still an active RAF station and Dad had spent many nights as duty officer there, during the Second World War when Bradford ATC were linked with Church Fenton. On the closure of Church Fenton the propellor was, at my request, given to Linton-on-Ouse.

To this day the lovely red mahogany ‘prop’ graces the wall of the officers’ mess ante-room, along with a small glass-faced box showing Flt/Lt J C Thompson and his RFC and RAF wings.

I hope to see them one more time before I too ‘pop my clogs’.

Geoffrey Thompson, Knaresborough

A POIGNANT FLYPAST

The recent article on the RAF in Yorkshire (April) reminded me of my first term at St Olave’s Prep School (now Ripon Cathedral Choir School) in 1939.

There was a boy there called Staton whose father was a wing-commander at Dishforth. Probably because of that, we visited the aerodrome on Empire Air Day and admired the modern marvels.

That weekend we were playing cricket in the field at the back when a Whitley bomber came so low over us that we could see the pilot — probably Staton — waving and could smell the exhaust.

The war started soon after, and Staton led the first bomber raid of the war on the naval base at Syldt. He never returned, and we did not see his son again.

John Davis, Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada

RAF DESTROYING DALES TRANQUILITY

A ewe and a lamb in a doorway, bathed in a blood-red glow, gave your April cover design a sinister Passover feel.

And talking of angels of death passing over, what’s this? A feature article about the activities of the RAF in Yorkshire? Maybe you have left it to the photograph to hint at what the article glosses over.

Low-flying jets destroy the very tranquility that is the essence of the Dales rural idyll, and blast humans and animals out of their senses with shock, awe and horror. And they’re on ‘our’ side. 

“But Our Boys have to practise … don’t they?” No, they don’t, because, as everyone knows at some level, this baroque arsenal is an unsustainable aberration in human and environmental terms. 

So, what about all those enemies, then? Where are they? In the mind-set, and in the fuel tanks.

Global warming? World War Three, anyone? Neither of those logical outcomes of the RAF’s activities will do the Dales much good.

The Dales National Park should be a demilitarised zone. Low flying should be done along the Thames, with extra buzzes over the terraces at Westminster. 

Julie Cowdery

BEWARE OF THE KELPIE AT NIGHT

I don’t think Jonathan Herbert (April) would have dared to walk along the riverbank from Cover Bridge to Jervaulx Abbey at night if he had known what lives there.

According to legend, there is a kelpie (water horse) which haunts the river, on the stretch where the Ure joins the Cover. It is said that he rises out of the mist to lure his victims into the river — never to be seen again. So a lucky escape Jonathan.

Diana Jolland, Leyburn

HUNTING MINK NOT OTTERS

With reference to otter conservation and otter hunting (‘Otterly delightful animals’, Feb), the hunting of otters with packs of hounds ceased largely voluntarily as the various hunts became aware of the threat to the balance of nature of declining otter numbers. A threat which existed from many causes, not merely because they were being hunted. Packs turned their attention to a more recent scourge of fish stocks and those birds and animals living in close proximity to water — the non-native mink. This fact is little appreciated and certainly never admitted to by those who oppose hunting of any kind.

To pre-empt the usual rejoinder from the antis that mink-hound packs just hunted otters under the cover of hunting mink; in many years of following mink-hounds, I have never seen an otter hunted or killed by them, even in areas where otters lived in good numbers.

David Conyers, Bradford

NAMES ETCHED ON WINDOWS

My great-grandfather, Joseph Priestley (born Elland, 1834), married Agnes Scott in Halifax in 1857. Agnes was born in Clapham in 1834 and was the daughter of Thomas Scott, a stone-flag merchant, and Jane Shepherd (born Giggleswick, 1794).

Scratched on a window facing the bridge of the New Inn, Clapham, are some signatures. Three of these are B Scott, H Eggleston and A Priestley. There is another name, possibly J Firth, scratched close by on the same pane.

Could these be graffiti scratched by my grandfather and his cronies on a visit to Clapham to see his mother’s relations maybe 160 years ago? The window is old enough for this to be the case.

If any readers can cast any light on the who these people may have been or actually confirm that they are my relations, I would be very grateful.

Edward Priestley, Uffington, Lincs

COURTING ON CAM FELL

Mention of Cam Houses (April) brought back memories of the early 1950s for me, too.

As a lass, courting a keen cyclist, I was taken from Horsforth, near Leeds, one Sunday — me on a sit-up-and-beg-type bike, him on a racing sports model — up the Dales and over Cam Fell.

It was a hot summer’s day and I needed a cooling drink. “Not in that stream — a dead sheep may be in it” were his exact words. Gasp! So we pedalled on down to the nearest pub where I had a well-earned orangeade. We’d done around 100 miles in the day.

Such is love. Our fifty-sixth anniversary is this August.

Barbara Buckley, Horsforth