Letters to the Editor - September 2008

As a Derbyshire man I was pleased to read that Sean Spiers (July) had made his first visit to the Peak District. He says he finds the ‘destructive large-scale quarrying at Backdale and Longstone Edge deeply worrying’. These particular workings have had a lot of publicity lately but are small beer compared with older but still very active ones at the huge Dene Quarry near Cromford.

In Derbyshire, quarries are part of the landscape and, in my view, a valid part. As to their being destructive, what is it they say about making an omelette? Do you want stone for your roads? Do you want cement? Do you want the minerals whose veins cut through the limestone, such as fluorspar, the chief source of fluorine, used in the manufacture of Teflon and anaesthetics and in the fluoridising of water supplies and toothpaste? Some scarring of the hills and dales is the price you have to pay.

‘Quarrying has its place’ Mr Spiers concedes and I would add, not only the active quarries in extracting the minerals we need, but also the disused ones, of which there must be hundreds. For it is from them we learn what Derbyshire is made of, what lies beneath the hills and dales, what determines its fertility, crops, flora – just about everything. In a word. its geology.

When Mr Spiers returns to Derbyshire I recommend he visits Wirksworth. This little town is surrounded by disused quarries. There he will find a fine footpath which passes right across Middle Peak Quarry and see stacked before him, laid down over millions of years, layer upon layer of limestone, composed largely of once living marine creatures. He should then visit the nearby National Stone Centre which is set on what was once the edge of a tropical lagoon where he can see fossils of coral and shells and, if he is really lucky, sharks’ teeth.

Tongue in cheek, no doubt, Mr Spiers was concerned that it might seem ‘heretical’ that he hadn’t minded staying a few miles from a cement works. Heresy implies a doctrine.

Must the countryside conform to this doctrine to be acceptable? Manufacturing may, Mr Spiers thinks, but only on an appropriate scale. Personally, I attend a slightly broader church.

Donald Bastable, Derbyshire

We have two owl boxes in the garden in oak trees about 100 yards apart and barn owls have used one of them for the last five years. The young have been ringed by the BTO every year. Squirrels have also made use of them. Last week the BTO rep came to ring the chicks and an owl flew out on putting up the ladder. On opening the inspection door out flew a mandarin duck! Inside were two fully feathered owl chicks and five duck eggs.What extraordinary nest companions.

I think the chicks have left the box but are still around the box area and if you sit around quietly at dusk they will sit in the trees above you and swear at you. I wonder if the duck has returned to the box but have resisted the temptation to have a look. I only hope the owls go before the ducks hatch or they will eat the ducklings. The other box has not been used by squirrels this year but had two addled mandarin duck eggs in it. Nature is full of surprises.

Rupert Hodges

Reading the article by Gervase Phinn that ended with a little boy responding to a question about the shepherd who left his ninety-nine sheep to find the one which was lost, I was reminded of another little boy years ago who attended the Sunday School class in the chapel I went to.

Christmas wasn’t far off and the preacher was talking about gifts, and he wanted to make a point that God’s gift to the world was Jesus, the best present of all. “Christmas,” he said, “is coming and what are we looking forward to especially?”

“Turkey,” piped up one hopeful.

“Yes,” replied the preacher. “I expect we are all looking forward to the turkey, but what else?”

Silence – then a hand shot up. “Gravy,” came the reply and the whole congregation burst into laughter. And it was so good to hear laughter in church.

Dorothy Wise, Bampton

I was overjoyed with our two pairs of blackbirds producing eight strong and healthy babies a few weeks back but sadly now there is only one young one left. One young was taken by a magpie on the lawn where it plucked it and ate it. Together with the sparrow hawk, I would say these two birds are guilty of killing many songbirds here. What would it be like without the sweet song of the blackbird singing out in the morning at 4am?

Most of the birds visiting the garden had done well with breeding but as the days go by their numbers drastically drop because of having too many predators around. News programmes mention the increase in rats, squirrels and other pests this year.

Predator birds are wiping out songbirds and farmland birds because they can’t find enough food for themselves out there with land not being turned over with the plough and fork and much of the land going under concrete and gravel. Even the growing population of seagulls are venturing farther inland to find food and that includes our songbirds.

Our pheasant population is coming to an end now what with men shooting them unlawfully in the breeding season and magpies and rooks feeding on their young. Pheasant shoots should only be done when run as a business and managed properly as other pheasants have little food to live on.

One female pheasant nested at the back of my bungalow in a sheltered garden. She was safe there from the buzzards, magpies and rooks up the field. She laid fourteen eggs and sat on them for a month only getting off for a snack twice a day. A magpie had a few of her eggs we believe when off her nest so we kept a careful eye on her. Seven chicks hatched out but two died just outside the nest.

When she ventured with her five chicks to the feeding ground a squirrel ran at her to attack her but the pheasant defended her chicks. By the next day only one chick remained. As she didn’t leave the garden we believe either a sparrowhawk or a magpie had the four chicks. The remaining one survived for fifteen days and the mother and her chick came for mealworms twice a day. They showed no fear and the mother would run after me for food with her chick. Sadly the chick disappeared then later the mother who we believe may have been shot.

What a lot of time and effort goes into producing their young and for what may I ask. Some chicks don’t even have a few hours of living and those who do have a battle to stop being eaten by predators. It’s about time Government ministers made some laws to protect the declining number of farmland birds and songbirds instead of spending time on feathering their own nests.

H Wooldridge, Kidderminster

Editor: More of your views on raptors in next month’s issue

Humphrey Phelps’ article (May) regarding Professor Stapleton, aroused many memories as I grew up on Frongoch Farm, the Welsh Plant Breeding Station, my father, J W Watkins, being the first superintendent there, from 1919 until his death in 1942.

Professor Stapleton was a man of vision – inspired and inspiring. He appointed the staff that he wanted to work with him, refusing to go through the charade of advertising.

They were dedicated and loyal, to the extent that when there was a crisis of funds during the depression, they were unanimous in taking on a reduction in salary rather than curtailing any of their work or losing staff.

Memories for me are of Ceinwen and the other girls, hand-pollinating white clover flowers in the Pratten glasshouses; of the mass of the delphiniums my father grew to attract bumble bees, which were caught, worked in test tubes and released into cages to pollinate red clovers. The parent stocks of grasses grew through a string mesh in greenhouses – a tweak of the string outside on a warm sunny day released a cloud of pollen.

On some hill farms, trial plots were fenced off – a vivid green amongst the surrounding natural heritage. Studies of the grazing habits and preferences of sheep involved twenty-four-hour observation in summer.

The International Grassland Conference in 1937 was a highlight, with people from all over the world coming to the WPBS and we wondered how they fared when war broke out prior to that. Bruce Levy flew in from New Zealand, landing his plane on Borthe Beach – no airports then.

I was privileged to know Professor Stapleton when I was a child. He loved children, but had none of his own and his nephew was killed in the war. Cricket was of great interest to him, and when the English team were touring Australia in 1936 he would telephone after the 6 o’clock news every night to know the score. He refused to have a radio in his house. It was my job to listen to the news and give him all the details – I’ve been interested in cricket ever since.

Joy Amos, New Zealand

This is a photo of a duck which hatched in May 1989 or 1990 so at the very least she is eighteen years old. Are there any records of ducks attaining a great age and if so how does this one compare? I purchased an incubator in May 1989/1990 with some eggs already in it. Three eggs hatched, one had a short life of three years the other was 16-17 years old when she died.

Richard Walker, Llantrisant

How different the shops were when I was a child. Nobody knew about germs then. There was the Maypole and the Co-op which supplied groceries. The counters were marble slabs and cheese was cut up by hand on this. Bacon was chosen by you from the sides hanging up and then put on the slicer. You chose the number for the slice and the assistant turned the handle and the slices came away to be wrapped in greaseproof paper.

The same applied to the cooked ham and tongue, all on the same slicer (no handwashing). A smaller grocer’s shop had sacks lining the walls where you walked in. They had dried peas, oats, sugar and anything dry which was fetched out in a scoop and put into bags placed on the scales. My mother said she had seen dogs walk in and lift their legs on the sacks and she wouldn’t trade there.

In the butchers were large round tins of lard which the butcher’s wife scooped out with a big knife and at the bottom of the lard would be brown jelly gravy which was delicious. The butcher’s wife was fat with beautiful skin. My mother said this was because she always wiped her hands on her arms or face when she had been weighing lard. There were two bakers’ shops but my mother always made her own bread, cakes and pastries. If it was one of our birthdays, as a special treat the birthday boy or girl could go to the baker’s and choose a dozen iced ‘fancies’ for tea. I think you were given two extra (is this a bakers dozen?).

Jean Coates, Ravenshead

Mr Childs responds sensibly enough to articles by Robin Page that remark on the negative influence of the EU on British Life. He goes on to comment that the British Government have to pass into law the EU diktats and quotes a Liberal Democrat MEP as his source.

We have various statistics about this. The most recent I see is 110,000 EU diktats have been passed into UK law. Recently the BBC gave ‘diktats from abroad’ as currently arriving at about a thousand a year, noting that of those only about six are debated by our parliament. For the rest, the civil service are having them processed in blocks through parliament.

The EU assembly is not geared to support proposals from MEPs in the way of our Westminster Parliament – the EU accepts or rejects, at a staggering rate, ‘committee proposals’. The EU is on the model of the centralised control system of the USSR.

And ‘yes’ to Mr Childs: let’s all share expertise and benefit from each other but don’t let’s limit ourselves to seventy-seven EU countries – let’s be interacting as the UK, with all the nations of the world on terms that we, the people of the UK, decide.

I think Robin Page has a very clear view of what is happening to our nation and is not a victim of EU propaganda.

C. H. Caffin, address supplied

Seeing the short story about Tommy Farr, reminded me of my childhood when my father used to ask me to get up early to hear the boxing broadcast from the USA, about Tommy’s bouts. Tommy Farr was a lovely man and had a wonderful singing voice.

Joan Fristby, Fleet

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