During the Napoleonic wars, a French ship ran aground on the coast at Hartlepool, and the ship’s mascot, a monkey, was washed ashore. The good people of Hartlepool, believing it to be a French spy, tried the unfortunate creature, found it guilty of enspionage, and hanged it.
However, there is one school of thought which proposes that the monkey did in fact escape, and went on to become the town’s Member of Parliament.
I believe it’s name was Peter.
She’d fallen in love with the wrong man, a servant piper, so her father had him tied up in a cave underneath the Wine Tower at the water’s edge. Then he locked his daughter up in the upper floor of the tower, and retired to his castle for the night. There was a storm in the night, and a high tide, and you can guess the rest. When the daughter heard that her lover had drowned, she jumped to her death from the top of the tower, and it’s said that her ghost is seen as an omen of bad weather on the way, and sometimes you can hear the sound of pipes in the wind playing a mournful lament.
It’s all rubbish, of course.
Holy Trinity & All Saints is a fishermen’s church at Winterton on the Norfolk coast. Inside, there’s a memorial there to Clarence Albert Pratt-Porter, rector of the parish, who died trying to rescue a choirboy on the beach, who got into difficulties while he was teaching him to swim.
The arctic tern (sterna paradisea) is the angriest bird in the world, and with good reason. This ground-nesting bird migrates from the edge of Antarctica to its breeding grounds in the far north, and when it gets there it has to put up with thousands of bloody tourists tramping all over the place.
No wonder it gets annoyed and attacks them.
This video was recorded on Inner Farne, off the coast of Northumberland.
The Farne Islands, just a few miles off the Northumberland coast, have long been a destination for hermitage and pilgrimage. Saint Cuthbert, who preferred the company of birds and donkeys to that of humans, had a little cell on Inner Farne in the seventh century, but now the only pilgrims are those intent on photographing the bird life – the arctic tern in particular is a popular attraction, as are the shags and puffins, and it’s often impossible to move for birders and twitchers with their ridiculously large equipment.
The first part of this piece is an incantation naming the various seabirds sampled from an old bird identification LP , the second part is a jig performed by Saint Cuthbert whilst being attacked by arctic terns, and the final part is an arctic tern beatbox.
A summer night on Blakeney Marshes with an ancient Box Brownie.
