15 January 2007
Steer clear of winter visitor to dunes
Ramblers in the Horsey area should be on the lookout for a rare winter visitor to the area – the obnoxious woolly-hatted dune walker.
We came across one just into the new year when we ventured past the Nelson Head public house, across the meadows and out on to the sand.
As we emerged from the cut in the dunes we noticed a lone seal. We thought of having it with chips, but decided to leave it alone.
Turning left towards Horsey Gap, we were met by a couple of walkers of the female persuasion, who warned us that we should avoid disturbing a mother seal and her pup, just ahead. We assured them that we would give them a wide berth.
At this point the obnoxious dune walker appeared, with his distinctive booming cry, “Get off the beach.”
I was reluctant to approach him in case he panicked and ran into the sea, especially as he was accompanied by a rather elderly looking member of the same species, who may have been his mate. Its distinctive though softer cry of “Ridiculous, ridiculous” was, I noticed, slightly less likely to disturb the seals, one or two of which I now saw in the distance.
To try to minimise any disruption, we climbed up the dunes towards the pair. I was accompanied by a sociology professor and felt the experience might come in handy for research purposes.
On my inquiring politely why I should get off the beach, the ODW retorted that he did not have to tell me why, suggesting that he had delusions of owning the beach, which may be a characteristic of this species.
In fact the species may be prone to more widespread delusions, as this particular specimen seemed to think that we should have seen notices not to go on the beach, though there weren’t any; that we should have deduced from the emptiness of the beach that we shouldn’t go on it anyway (the book I was using said the beach was frequently deserted); and that we should have known there were many seals on the beach, though we had only just set foot on it.
Hopefully the ODW and his mate have now moved on to warmer climes, but I suggest that visitors to the Horsey area watch out for them.
When we eventually reached Horsey Gap, expecting to find numerous “Keep off the beach” notices, all we could find was a small one attached to a fence that said: “Do not attempt to return young seals to the sea.”
Personally, I wouldn’t dream of touching a seal of any kind. But I could think of one or two other creatures I would like to propel seaward.
Frightening disappearance of coach and horses
Shock news on the Christmas card front. A contributor who has been religiously documenting the contents of his cards for the last 40 years has come up with a statistic far more frightening than the loss of the word Christmas in favour of Season’s Greetings, Merry Winterval or Have as Good a Time as you Can at Roughly this Time of the Year.
He reports that this Christmas (or the recent December Event, if you prefer) he received only one Christmas card that featured a coach and horses in the snow – “three pairs of horses, driver and three passengers topsides, red livery”.
That represents, he says, a frightening overall card percentage drop in coach and horses from about 85 per cent 40 years ago to under one per cent this year.
“Is this the end of something?” he asks. “Are coaches and horses (and snow) the victims of global warming? I really do think we should be told.”
Nowhere near here
I mentioned last time that an appropriate place for the notorious “Nothing Happened” plaque in Turnstile Lane, Bungay, would have been Nowhere, near Acle.
I now discover that there are at least five other Norfolk villages not a million miles away from Nowhere. They are Repps, West Caister, Great Witchingham, Wiveton and Wereham, and they are listed (together with Wenhaston, in Suffolk) in a fascinating volume called Norfolk Fragments, by former diarist and walker Bruce Robinson, whose research into the sideways history of Norfolk is legendary.
The book is published by Elmstead Publications and concludes of the places called Nowhere: “Some seemed to have been scraps of land at places where parish boundaries met.”
I understand that others were stations on the M&GN line.
Coincidentally a founder member of the West Norfolk Mountain Rescue Team has been kind enough to send me a “Nothing Happened here in 1832” plaque, which is on my desk as I write. I am trying to think of the right spot for it.
Winners are not newts
A couple of readers have responded to my article on the risk of corrupting innocent nightingales by sending them down the road of money-spinning great crested newts.
Newts, it seems, may have been hoist by their own expansionist petard.
Apparently the cost of safeguarding the protected amphibians through obtaining a Defra licence is so expensive that many would feel the only way to make progress was not to notice the newts in the first place. This could easily result in the loss of newt colonies.
“The only winners are those who are getting paid, and it’s not newts,” I’m told.
Temperatures up and down
Forecasters at the Met Office have predicted that this year is likely to be the warmest on record globally. They also point out that last year was the warmest year on record across the UK – though for some reason omitting to mention that globally it was only the fifth warmest in the current century – or to put it another way, the second coolest.
Meanwhile I read that official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia show that “the global average temperature did not increase between 1998 and 2005”. Can this be true?