Moorland singer is road victim

I found his battered little body on the roadside during my morning walk where he was clearly the victim of a hit-and-run traffic accident.

It was a male bird - the head and breast were bright yellow, while his wings and back were more of a chestnut shade; his mate is similarly coloured but perhaps she is not so brightly marked.

Yellowhammers are plentiful in the open countryside and seem to enjoy the edges of moorland where there are gorse bushes and other forms of shelter, although they are fairly prominent around commons and also in our hedgerows. In spite of that, I've not noticed the species in my part of the world - to see a yellowhammer, I've had to venture some distance on to the moors.

As we are in the nesting season, I am now wondering if there is a female in the vicinity, perhaps attempting to rear her brood without the ministrations of her unfortunate mate.

Yellowhammers, which are members of the bunting family, usually nest on the ground, well hidden among the dense plants at the base of a hedge or bush - sometimes, they might even built off the ground in the lower parts of a hedge, but the nest is built by the female. The whitish eggs are covered with what appear to be childish scribblings with a felt tip pen and for this reason, the bird is sometimes called a scribble lark.

It is better known, perhaps, for its well-known song which is always described as sounding like "a little bit of bread and no cheese", although it does produce other notes, one of which is a long single sound like zizzee-zizzee, and this note often identifies the bird's presence in a dense bushy area.

For reasons which are difficult to understand, in medieval times the yellowhammer was thought to be a bird of evil. Some ancient beliefs said it drank the devil's blood on the morning of May Day, and others thought it gave birth to snakes from its eggs.

Probably, this latter belief was due to the scribblings on the egg shells which can look like miniature snakes, although one good aspect was that if you held three dead yellowhammers close to your face, they would cure your yellow jaundice!

INN signs provide hours of interest for anyone willing to research their sources and they can sometimes provide amusement and even education for children during lengthy journeys in the car. They might try to count the number of King's Heads or Royal Oaks, and then decide why such names were given to the inns.

One aspect which is very important is that inn signs are a unique means of recording the wider view of history, from heraldry to industry by way of literature, sport and humour.

I was reminded of this when a young landlord in Bristol changed the sign on his inn. It was called The Victoria and, as one might expect, the sign depicted Queen Victoria - but for a landlord not yet in his thirties, Queen Victoria means very little and so he placed the picture of another Victoria on his inn sign.

She was Victoria Beckham, for as he explained, she is more famous today than the queen of the same name. History moves on, of course; we cannot stay locked in one particular period and it is for this reason that we get inn signs like The Churchill or Sir Francis Chichester, various ones depicting the railways or the war, trades and professions or those named after ships or aircraft.

In many cases, new names came along as a form of commemoration, either of a person or a development. Most inn signs can be divided into categories, such as heraldic, like the Red Rose, Blue Boar, the Dragon or the Falcon; royal signs varying from The Crown to those bearing the names of former monarchs; signs honouring famous people like Churchill, the Marquis of Granby, the Duke of Wellington, Robin Hood and others; signs depicting animals like The Hare, The Greyhound, the White Horse, White Swan and so forth, or signs linked to particular trades, like the Boltmakers Arms, Horsebreakers' Arms and Cloggers' Arms.

Religion features in names like The Angel, Cross Keys, The Star, The Mitre, Lion and Lamb and even The Bell, this being a name given to an inn which was part of a monastery (eg when travelling, you made for the sound of the bell, an inn which was then part of a monastery).

Sports such as foxhunting, horse racing, greyhound racing, cricket, football and boxing have produced their own signs, as has the world of literature and the brewing trade itself, and there is now a growing tendency to use objects which have no apparent link, such as the Beehive and Cross, Moon and Sixpence, Swan and Railway or Horse and Tiger, with humorous examples like the Drop Inn, the Quiet Woman or the Never Inn.

There are inns called Flying Saucer, or Man in Space; I've been told of one called Bunch of Carrots, another called Dock Green and one close to an airport called Flyover.

With new inns regularly appearing, it is probable their names will reflect something or someone either very historic or very local, although there does seem a fashion now for inflicting modern and meaningless names on pubs, such as the Slug and Lettuce, the Rat and Parrot or the Quids Inn.

With something like 70,000 inns in this country, there is bound to be a lot of repetition and I believe the most numerous of inn names include The Crown, the King's Head and the Coach and Horses. Among the rarest must be those whose names honour a particular person of a locality and in this region, we have the CB Inn in Arkengarthdale, now given its full name of Charles Bathurst, who was a leadmining magnate of the district. As the CB, this had the distinction of being one of the shortest pub names in England, while not far away is Tan Hill, occupying the loftiest site of any pub in England.

IN several publications during recent weeks, I've read that goldilocks will be blooming in our woodlands around this time. But to which of our wild flowers does this name apply? So far as I can see, it is the marsh marigold which blooms as early as March and will continue to do so until the late summer. It is a flower which favours damp places such as bogs, wet woodlands, marshes and even the sides of ditches.

The snag is that the marsh marigold has about a hundred alternative names and these depend upon the area in which one lives. Goldilocks appears to be used chiefly in the West of England, but there are too many others to include here. However, a few examples are bachelor's buttons (Dorset), chirms (Northamptonshire), butter flower (Wiltshire), gipsy's money (Somerset), kingcup (Northumberland, Yorkshire, Ireland, Kent and East Anglia) and there are countless more such as policeman's buttons, bobby's buttons, water babies, water geordies, water gowan, Mary buds or bulldogs.

These are among the most ancient of our wild flowers. It is known they grew in Britain before the Ice Age but they are also a flower of our northern hemisphere, flourishing inside the Arctic Circle and blossoming often as snow lies in the ground.

Their bright and shining gold petals, which are odourless, are a feature of dark and damp places where they seem to flourish and there is little wonder they were welcomed by all who saw them.

In former times, country people hung marsh marigolds over the doors of their cow byres, usually on May Day, in the belief they would deter witches and evil spirits from harming the cattle, and there is a supposition that Shakespeare referred to these flowers as Mary buds in Cymbeline.

In some areas, however, they are called mare buds or mare blobs. A yellow dye can be obtained from the petals and in some countries, the leaves are eaten as a vegetable and so this very widespread flower does have its domestic uses.

But if this is not goldilocks, what is? Another type of buttercup perhaps