An Old line in mole catching

Who sang it? The answer at the foot of the column.

Ambling through Upper Teesdale last Saturday, we were thus taken aback to come upon hundreds of them - hung out symmetrically on a barbed wire fence, like stags above a manorial fireplace.

"It's just somewhere to keep them, really," insists Alison Bainbridge, mole catcher extraordinary. "I suppose it also tells other people how many you've caught."

The mole, it's true, is unlikely to see it as a deterrent - or given its notoriously indifferent eyesight, as much else, either.

Long an agricultural menace, their population has multiplied since foot and mouth disease when pest controllers couldn't get on to the land. A particularly industrious mole - carnivorous, particularly fond of earthworms, capable of eating its own 4oz weight in a day - can tunnel 100 yards at a stretch and live up to four years, unless Alison gets them first.

This year, using barrel traps, she's caught around 300. "It's the fells that are the problem. Obviously no one catches them up there and then in the Spring they land up here. I also do a bit of catching for the neighbours; you can't be sentimental about moles.

"I have a lot of patience and a border terrier. People like her because she gets the odd rabbit as well, and only too pleased to do it.

"We're clear of them on our land now, but they'll come again by the back end. You can probably say we'll be ready."

Alison lives in Harwood-in-Teesdale, these days just a few far-scattered Raby Estate farmsteads beyond the Langdon Beck Hotel but once a well plumbed lead mining area.

Evidence of workings remains. There are also the gables of a 1724 chapel and schoolroom - the chap in charge paid £9 a year to run both - and an 1860 chapel ("extended 1887," says the stone) now being converted into a lonely house.

The London Lead Company's black bags are long packed, men and workings exhausted. Harwood's now happy home to curlew, redshank and snipe, to black grouse and oyster catcher - though there may not be too many oysters around Cow Green reservoir - to harebell, globe flower and blue gentian.

The No 73 bus will even drop off on the scenic route if it, and the Alston Road Garage down in Middleton, are spoken to nicely.

That handsome heath is also home to Kath Toward, a big city lass from Liverpool who married her dalesman husband, Maurice, 38 years ago. Both have won national awards for farm management and promotion.

"I didn't have the rose-tinted glasses off when I married him," she says. "It can get a bit bleak and I'm still not sure I'm used to it after all these years. I go back every so often for a rub of the Liver birds."

The Towards' son does a bit of mole catching, too, usually presenting his victims in a bucket and paid a pint a body. Alison, says her neighbour, is "brilliant" at it.

"Hanging them out like that is a country practice you hardly see any more. I think maybe it's a sales pitch for the mole catcher and maybe a way of saying 'Yah boo, look how many I've caught' to the neighbours.

"To townspeople it's all Little Moley, but they're really destructive.

"There are thousands of the damn things around here, as bad, if not worse, than rabbits.

"By the time they'd pushed up all the grass, and the rabbits had eaten it, our cows and sheep just wouldn't have any eatage."

Alison's only too happy to help. No mountains out of molehills in heaven-sent Harwood-in-Teesdale.

Apart from Mr Kenneth Grahame's riparian yarn, the best remembered mole story may be that of King William of Orange, who died in 1702, 16 days after his horse had fallen over a mole hill in Hampton Court Park.

The Jacobites frequently raised a toast thereafter to "The little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat."

The song about the Mole that Lived in a Hole - "a stupid song," they once supposed - was a minor, but much remembered hit in 1958, for a group called the Southlanders.

Bowled over by the Batts.

Not the sort of thing you usually hear from this column, we have been having a beer with Mr Bryn Roberts to discuss Richmond Live - very much alive.

It's a free music event, now in its ninth year, and since there's never any trouble, neither the town nor the wider world may have heard much of it, either.

"The only time we got in the papers was when we decided last year to recycle all the litter we'd collected," says Bryn.

"There were five tons of it. By the time we've finished, the Batts are cleaner than when we take them over."

Like so much else, it also began over a few beers - Mike Jinks and family much involved. The inaugural event took just six weeks to organise and featured only four or five bands, on the Batts bandstand down by the Swale.

Now a 14-member committee spends the previous 12 months planning and fund raising, an estimated 12,000 people will gather on August 4-5 in front of adjoining stages - 90ft in total - and Bryn and other volunteers will spend the previous week setting up and living in caravans.

Though the line-up sounds youthful - bands like The Patio Doors, Outrageous Wallpaper, The Golden Virgins, All Sexy But Ginger and The Exploding Buddhas - he insists there's something for everyone.

"Eight to 80, nine to 90, call it what you want. It's just organised by people with a love of music, from early 20s to Chopin-loving late 50s, and you sort of get sucked in."

A solicitor with Middlesbrough council, Bryn is 35, lives in Richmond, has just finished singing with the local amateur operatic society in Fiddler on the Roof, owns 11 guitars, hopes to become a professional singer.

Input from the Op Soc, he says, has "occasionally" been considered. "We'll look at absolutely anything. We've had some very strange bands play over the years."

It's run by a non-profit making limited company, everyone unpaid. Most of the bands are unpaid, too, and still beg to be given their chance.

Marillion, among the best known, attracted fans from across the world, stayed at the Scotch Corner Hotel, arrived at the Batts by bus at 7.30am.

"They spent all day walking around, talking to people. It's the sort of atmosphere you can only get at a place like Richmond.

"It's easy going. People come with their families and come with their picnics. Maybe parents wouldn't like too much heavy metal but they'd be foot-tapping in the acoustic tent.

"There's just a lovely feel to the event and the most we've ever has is two arrests. There's no point in doing it just to irritate people."

It's funded from other gigs, by sponsorship from the Black Sheep Brewery and others, and by lots of good will.

"It's just fun doing it," says Bryn. "By nine o'clock you're looking down on a sea of people bouncing up and down to the music and it's wonderful.

"It's because we can. There's nothing more rewarding than that."

* Richmond Live runs on the evening of Friday August 4 and all day on August 5, until 11pm. Details on www.richmondlive.org.

Joining up the Dots.

Whatever happened to the Dainty Dots, asked last week's column - and thanks as usual to those wonderful readers, we've been joining up the Dots quite nicely.

They were, as we said, a Hartlepool dance troupe led by Miss Cora Tucker. She died exactly a year ago, aged 101.

"Over the years thousands of people in Hartlepool and district learned ballroom and other dancing from her," writes Mr R M Potter, who married a Dainty Dot and is still in Hartlepool.

"We've seen her teaching when full of flu when we lesser mortals would be cossetting ourselves and bemoaning our fate, and yet still she displayed the same patience and understanding. She was a remarkable lady."

A dance to the music of time, Mr L Chilton in Leyburn - a Dainty Dot from 1926-33 - not only sends a photograph of that immaculately attired extravaganza but a programme from the Dainty Dots' town hall concert, June 14, 1932.

They sang "Shoo your blues away" and "Lily of Laguna" and "Buy British", performed a ballet in which Winnie Mood played a piece of white coral, acted a play called The Ugly Duckling and much else. Half the profits went to the local blind.

Perhaps most remarkable of all, Chris Eddowes - also in Hartlepool - recalls that for her 100th birthday, Miss Cora requested, and got, a fireman strippogram.

"The general opinion around here is that the Dots won't be so dainty any more," says Chris. "Miss Cora was clearly another matter."