I gave it the sympathy like there Boxty. He has the award now.
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I had a pre-birthday epiphany earlier. I’m in great spirits emboldened by the fact that life
Is short. Like @Horsebox
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Damning and not even bothering with the faint praise.
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The forum’s elders coming together to smoke the pipe of peace. And all for you. A dirty Dub.
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Its created plenty of debate and it will be interesting to see how it works in practice but hopefully it’s a bright new dawn for patients with alzeihmers and their families.
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Bringing my bhoys swimming. Thank you Dr Holohan.
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It’s a very controversial decision by the FDA, the 11 member committee voted 10-0 against approval and one abstained. Three committee members have resigned.
Also this. I shouldn’t really post, but one of my best ever pals sent me this :
“Was in Galway at the weekend and missed yesterday’s game as was travelling back up, il watch it tonight. Saw a minor club game yesterday though, standard was way better than I was expecting but the filth and spite was exactly what I was expecting!”
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No one knows precisely how the animals escaped from the zoo at Roaches Hall — though the rumours go that the gamekeepers released them during the second world war, when food was rationed and there were other things to worry about.
For anyone watching, it might have seemed that doors of the Ark had opened on to the Staffordshire hills. In the zoo there were Barbary sheep and llamas, emus and jungle fowl, marmots and ibex. I imagined them cantering forth: bleating and leaping among the gorse and heather, the ash and oak and the dry-stone walls — free in a land that neither they nor their ancestors had known.
Of most animals, there is no record: it seems they soon died. A few Himalayan yak clung on, living on the moors into the 1950s, harassing cars and even tipping over a coal truck. But the last survivor of that great escape was the species farthest from home.
For at least 60 years, a population of red-necked wallabies lived wild on the Roaches — a ridge at the western tip of England’s Peak District National Park. I heard about them on a school trip here in 2002. To a bored teenager, it made my native Midlands seem less middling. Years later, I happened upon a wonderful website (roaches.org.uk) filled with anecdotes of the wallabies, who had become a beloved presence in these hills.
Roaches Hall, once home to a private zoo, sits at the southern end of the Roaches, a rocky ridge in the Peak District National ParkAt their peak there were about 50 — but as the years passed, sightings had become scarcer. The last conclusive photograph was in summer 2009. After that, the survival of the wallabies became the subject of speculation — a sort of marsupial Roswell. Then, unexpectedly, in 2017 the website announced: “It’s Looking as though the Wallabies haven’t all gone after all!!”: with a grainy picture of a wallaby near a pub west of the range. In the summer of 2021, the Roaches would be the closest I could get to Australia. And so I set off in my car.
The Peak District is Britain’s oldest national park — a mosaic of moors and valleys at the heart of England, ringed by the cities of Sheffield, Manchester and Derby. As the cradle of the industrial revolution, these cities changed the world; in the middle of them all is a landscape largely unchanged.
There’s a romance about spotting something out of the ordinary, that has no right to be there, clinging on and surviving
I take a meandering route west from Derby — passing rushing streams where the current pools under the willows, gritstone edges where the winds blow freely. There are place names that conjure England’s oldest stories: Druid’s Caves, Thor’s Cave, Robin Hood’s Stride. Within an hour’s drive of these cities, you feel as if you have escaped to a faraway place. With a glimpse of a wallaby, you might feel further still.
Eventually my car winds up a gravel driveway to Roaches Hall, a lodge among green lawns and Grecian urns, under a glowering cliff. Nowadays, the hall is hired for weddings and celebrations. In the 1930s, it was home to Henry Courtney Brocklehurst: adventurer, spy and zookeeper — part TE Lawrence, part Dr Dolittle. Born to an aristocratic family, Brocklehurst was on Shackleton’s trans-Antarctic expedition of 1914 (but returned to fight in the war). He later landed a job as game warden of Sudan, founding Khartoum Zoo and championing photographic safaris. By the late 1930s, his wife had divorced him on the grounds of adultery, and he lost his position in Sudan. He returned to England to build a second zoo, stocked with animals from Whipsnade.
One of the llamas in the Roaches; they are thought to have quickly died out“Perhaps there was some nostalgia for the animals he’d seen on his travels,” says Judy Weeks of the Swythamley Historical Society, who has researched his story.
To which Alan Weeks adds: “Some of his personal relationships were difficult. Maybe he had more affinity with animals than with people.”
In the second world war, Brocklehurst left the zoo to join the Special Services. In Burma, he found himself behind enemy lines as the Japanese invaded: he attempted to escape from near Mandalay and was never seen again, presumed drowned in the Irrawaddy River.
Today, Neil Thorneycroft is the caretaker at Roaches Hall. He leads me up a dark, creaking staircase, through a hobbit-sized door to the rooftop. It’s rumoured that Brocklehurst had the top floor of Roaches Hall removed so he could watch his menagerie roam the grounds, playing Noah among the chimneys. Today there is only a squirrel on the lawn and a cuckoo in the woods.
“It would be nice”, says Thorneycroft, nodding at the crags above the hall, “to think the wallabies are still out there, somewhere.”
The Roaches form a spine of rock , boulder-strewn and roughly three miles long. An artist friend described them as being shaped “like a stegosaurus”. After dusk, their silhouette looks to me like the ramparts of a castle, rising darkly over lamplit villages below. Its highest point is just 505 metres — though it seems, in the contour-starved English Midlands, to soar higher. Don Whillans and Joe Brown were the first to climb Kanchenjunga and the south face of Annapurna with hands once honed on the crags of the Roaches.
A footpath leads along the ridge of the Roaches © AlamyI reach the top, and all England stretches away to the south, patterned with parish churches, pylons, pubs and hedgerows. It is far from the eucalyptus forests of Tasmania where red-necked wallabies roam. But the climate isn’t so different, so the escapers went forth and multiplied: grazing on the grasses, they brought up generations of joeys under the upside-down constellations. They might have seen a bomber crash on the Roaches one night in 1941 — or, years later, noticed a mourning mother come from Germany to plant a rhododendron on that same spot. They would have seen livestock pyres raging during 2001’s foot-and-mouth outbreak — when the animals were seen hopping along empty country lanes. But I see no wallabies on my walk today.
Often they would shelter in Lud’s Church, a deep rocky chasm at the far northern end of the Roaches. Lud’s Church has a strange kind of sanctity: as I step inside, it feels less like a geological feature, more like a long forgotten ruin, its walls swathed in mosses. Academics have theorised that Lud’s Church is the Green Chapel in the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: “a ghostly cathedral overgrown with grass” where the hero meets his rival for a final reckoning.
I had read of wallabies appearing in Aboriginal Australian tales of “the Dreaming”: a time before linear time, when ancestral spirits — often animals — created the universe. Standing in Lud’s Church, it seemed like the wallabies had stumbled into a realm from England’s own Dreaming: of Arthur, Avalon and stories outside history.
Lud’s Church, a deep, mossy gorge in the Peak District © AlamyPerhaps this was overthinking it. In need of hard facts, I call up Dr Anthony Caravaggi — a lecturer in conservation biology at the University of South Wales. In 2020, Caravaggi published a paper on feral red-necked wallabies in the UK — there have been 95 verified sightings over 10 years to 2018, with hotspots in the Chilterns and Cornwall. Sadly, he believes the Roaches population has been extinct for a decade. But what about the 2017 sighting by the pub — didn’t that offer hope?
“I have no doubt in my mind that that one was a cat,” he says. “When you’re looking for cryptic species, it can be easy to see what you want to see.”
The winter of 2010 brought some of the heaviest snow I can remember to the UK. Drifts heaped heavy on the Peak District moors, icicles hung from the edges. Villagers were snowed inside for days — at Roaches Hall the water supply froze up. By the 2000s, it was believed that two wallabies were left: a mother and her daughter. Caravaggi tells me — if they were not gone already — that those white days were probably fatal for the last wallaby of the Peak, cold and hungry in a climate in which she could not survive.
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There is, however, one wallaby left that you can see: “Wally” — a young male who died after falling into the chasm of Lud’s Church at Christmas 1993. His taxidermied remains are on display in the Nicholson Museum in Leek, where Maria Killoran is the curator.
“It is a sad story,” Killoran tells me. “There was a joy in seeing the wallabies. But there’s a part of me feels they should never have been there at all. There’s a sense that they were [Brocklehurst’s] children in a way.”
Killoran’s daughter Leila tells me she caught one of the last sightings — a wallaby hopping beside an old barn in May 2008, close to where the zoo once stood. In an age when many species are becoming extinct, it might seem strange to mourn the last wallabies of the Roaches. Though they offer a cautionary tale in how beloved creatures vanish from our landscape: not with a bang but with a whisper, a rumour that they might still be out there somewhere. And that if you keep looking, then one day, just maybe . . .
A wallaby on the Roaches, in a photograph from the Nicholson Museum’s collection, date unknownTorrential rain turns to sunshine the afternoon I depart — rainbows arch high among charcoal clouds before the wind scatters them eastward, and the gorse glistens anew under blue sky. I pass by Dan Hall, a firefighter from Lincolnshire who has come to the Roaches specifically to find the wallabies (he packed his drone to look for them).
“I think there’s a romance in it,” he says. “It’s about spotting something out of the ordinary, that has no right to be there, clinging on and surviving. There’s a lesson for life there.”
I tell him about the false 2017 sighting, the winter of 2010, the likelihood that he and I have arrived a decade too late. He cups his ears. “Don’t ruin it for me”.
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It’s all up round there we cycle and run of a weekend.
Be careful mate.
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There’s an island in Dublin bay that has wallabies too.
How a colony of wallabies made an island off Dublin their home.
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The transfer value of the Power Cube. It’s increasing in multiples of €10m in accordance with goals scored. Klopp has just text a mate of mine that they’ll be looking “in or around” €60m for the portly chump.#zerotohero
I’ve a banjaxed knee and was due to travel to Kilkenny on Thursday to see a consultant.
Received a call from his secretary saying there’s been a cancellation and he can see me in Limerick tomorrow morning.
Huzzah!
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if it’s Breandán Long he is meant to be the biz.
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It is. Excellent news, in that case.
best of luck with it
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