A concrete managerie
A curious menagerie
garden to be seen in the small village
of Branxton in
Northumberland was the work of joiner John Fairington. In 1961 at the age of
80, John began to make life sized concrete and cement animals to amuse his
handicapped son Edwin. When he died 20 years later, John had acquired a vast
menagerie of some 300 animals and other figures which completely took over his
back garden. Inscriptions and verses abound in this ‘jardin imaginaire’ which
is freely open to the public.
The Mouse
The tiny village
of Kilburn nestles at the
foot of the Hambleton Hills near Sutton Bank in North
Yorkshire and is the home of a very famous animal, a mouse! Which
is the trademark of a local wood carver.
The ‘Mouseman’, Robert Thompson, was born in Kilburn in 1886 and
followed his father into the trade of wheelwright. Robert was very fond of carving wood and loved
English oak – ‘ No other wood has the
same character as oak, and this is the medium with which I can express my
feelings,’ he is quoted as saying to a monk at nearby Ampleforth Abbey who
had recognised the young man’s skill.
Robert was commissioned for work at the Abbey and soon developed an
interest in carving church furniture, although it was not such lucrative work
at that time. One day he thought of the
expression ‘poor as a church mouse’ and
had the idea to carve a mouse on his work.
Since that time the little mouse has appeared on all
Thompson furniture and carvings and is renowned in churches and home throughout
the country. Many examples can be seen
in churches everywhere, notably in York Minster and in Westminster Abbey. Just look for the little mouse. Robert Thompson died in 1955 aged 79 years
and his half timbered cottage still stands in Kilburn close to the modern
workshops where the Thompson family tradition is carried on by his family. A visit to the workshops and showrooms is an
enlightening experience and the mouse can be seen in action on most of the
furniture in Kilburn church.
The mouse in Kilburn Church
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The mouse at The Star Inn, Harome
The Canongate stag
A fine stag's head on the wall inside Jennie Ha's pub in Edinburgh's Canongate came from a
stag which was killed in nearby Holyrood Park by a man called Eck as he walked
to work one morning at the pub. The stag was running amok amongst tourists
in the park and at great personal risk Eck ‘nutted’ the stag twice knocking it
insensible and then wrested it to the ground finally finishing it off with his
knife.
This also reminds us that Canongate’s emblem is a stag’s
head deriving from a story that King David 1 was hunting in the park in 1128
when a stag charged and knocked him off his horse and wounded him. To fend it
off the King reached out and clutched a cross he saw in its antlers. The cross
came away in his hand and the stag turned away and left him alone. Thankful to
be alive, the King asked the Augustinian Canons to build the Abbey of Holyrood
on the spot – the ‘Church of the Holy Cross’.
Wild boar
Ripley near Harrogate in North Yorkshire is
a small estate village connected to Ripley Castle.
This estate
has belonged to the Ingilby family since the 14th century. Thomas
Ingilby (1290-1369), who descended from
a noble line dating back to the Norman Conquest, held high office in the
judiciary during the reign of King Edward 111. In 1355, while hunting wild boar
with the King in the Forest of Knaresborough, Ingilby prevented the King from
suffering serious injury or even death by killing a wounded boar that was about
to attack the King. The King knighted him and granted him a Charter for a
weekly market and annual fair at Ripley.
Sir Thomas adopted a boar’s head into
his coat of arms.
Ripley wild boar
Boar's head door knocker at Ripley Castle
Killed by a ‘tyger fierce’
A poignant gravestone in the Abbey graveyard at Malmsbury
in Wiltshire is a stark reminder of the days when the Circus came to town, in
this case as far back as 1703. 33 years
old Hannah Twynnoy was a maid at the White Lion Hotel in Malmsbury. She died on October 23rd, 1703, after being
savaged by a lion. The epitaph on her
gravestone reads :
In the bloom of life
She’s snatchd from hence
She had not room
To make defence
For Tyger fierce
Took her life away
And here she lies
In a bed of clay
Until the Resurrection Day.
Hannah's gravestone
Charlie the elephant
Soon after the Second World War, Billy Butlin opened one
of his largest holiday camps on the outskirts of Filey on the Yorkshire
coast. The camp was serviced by its own
railway station and had absolutely everything for the complete holiday for
11,000 people, with 1,000 staff.
In 1961 a tragedy occurred at Butlins – the keeper of
Charlie the elephant – died. Charlie, a
firm favourite with young and old, then became quite violent and bad tempered
and was totally inconsolable. The
problem was so great that eventually Charlie had to be put down. His stall was sealed off and he was gassed
by the fumes from a lorry. He was buried
at the side of the elephant house.
The camp closed down in 1983 and in 1989 the buildings
were demolished when the site became derelict.
At the turn of the century permission was granted for the site to be
re-developed. What a shock for somebody
should they uncover Charlie’s remains!
Deriliction at Butlin's
The Hartlepool
Monkey
A cast iron monkey which can be seen alongside the lock
which gives access to the inner harbour at Hartlepool
in the North East of England is used to collect coins for charity. It
reminds us of the story that a French ship was wrecked off the headland during
the Napoleonic Wars. Apparently the only survivor was a monkey which was
dressed in a French Sailors’ uniform, probably the ships mascot. The simple fishermen who found the monkey had
never seen a monkey before, nor had they seen a Frenchman, and they assumed
that it was a French spy. They put the
monkey on trial and it was sentenced to death. The ceremony was duly carried
out on the beach when the monkey was hanged as a spy.
The Hartlepool monkey
Whalebone arch
The port
of Whitby in North Yorkshire reached its hey day in the 18th
century when it was the centre of the whaling industry. The only reminder of those times is the
fine ‘whalebone arch’, a curiosity which is preserved on the West Cliff.
Another ‘whalebone arch’ can be seen at the entrance to a
private house drive in the village
of Threekington in Lincolnshire. The local squire had business interests in
the whaling industry in the 19th century.
Threekington
Whitby
Kirkdale Cave
In 1821 quarry men, working in a quarry alongside Hodge
Beck in Kirkdale near Kirkbymoorside in North Yorkshire, uncovered a cave in
which they found a large amount of bones.
Dr Buckland, Professor of Geology at Oxford, explored the 100 yards long cave and found the remains of no less than 200
hyenas, as well as the bones from a huge variety of wild animals and tools and weapons of
Stone Age man. The animals included
woolly and slender nosed rhinoceros, lion, mammoth, hippopotamus, European
bison, reindeer, wolves, bears, straight tusked elephants, wild ox and
deer. This find rocked the scientific
thinking world and put new ideas about what had in fact happened in the far distant
past. Dr Buckland concluded that the
cave had been a hyena lair and that the other remains were of animals dragged
there by the hyena’s for food.
It seems that Kirkdale
Cave was originally a
river cave which was left well above the river level after the retreat of the
ice during the last phase of the ice-age.
There were times of warmth between the glaciated periods and it was
during the last of these which spanned something like 50,000 years, that the
hyena’s came to Kirkdale and left the remains, proving that Britain had
once been the home of animals which up to that time had been thought to be far
removed from these shores. A truly
remarkable discovery.
Kirkdale cave
The Three Wise Monkeys
A troop of monkeys to be seen at The Highland Wildlife Park in Scotland are Japanese snow monkeys and are the origin of the 'Three Wise Monkeys'. Shinto priests at Kyoto have thought of these monkeys as messengers to the gods for some 1500 years.
The Japanese character for monkey is pronounced as 'saru' ('zaru; means not). A play on words led to the monkey being used with phrases : Mizaru, Kikazaru and Iwazaru =
see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
Snow monkeys
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