Ingham’s W RLD
THE OTHER steamy night I went out drinking in Hyde Park with two real-life war horses. Aragon and Roy stood nearly 7ft tall, their feathered white legs looking like 1970s flared trousers. They are one quarter of London’s last herd of working shire horses, mowing the meadows and clearing the logs of the capital’s Royal Parks and taking tourists for carriage rides.
They were the superstars at the launch of a book by my colleague, photographer Paul Stewart, which chronicles a year in their life.
In 1900 there were one million shire horses in the UK. Now they are rarer than the giant panda. So Paul teamed up with Operation Centaur which works with the Royal Parks and Historic Royal Palaces to save this splendid breed.
His book has royal approval. In the foreword Prince Charles praises the work of the shires and how they lift the spirits of everyone lucky enough to see them. There’s also a brief contribution from someone much less distinguished – me – about the horses’ environmental benefits. They can reach the parts of the park modern machinery cannot, pollute less and have a much lighter footprint.
Soils are less compacted so longlost flowers can return to the meadows. Shires also go brackenbashing, hauling rollers over the smothering plant to keep it under control. They are also used as therapy, say, to help schools counter bullying. Children learn to work together to handle these one-ton giants instead of squabbling.
But as I stood by these placid beasts, G&T in hand, it was hard to believe that they are war horses. They trace their origins to Henry VIII who decreed that English horses were too puny for his knights and ordered a breeding programme to boost their size. Aragon and Roy are the result.
Operation Centaur’s head horseman Tom Nixon said: “Whenever we go out, people stop to take pictures. They don’t do that with tractors.”
So let’s hope such groups can save this beautiful breed from going the way of the dodo.
The Last Herd by Paul Stewart (Photography into Art, £34.99), 20 per cent goes to help shires. STANDING on top of Maiden Castle outside Dorchester in Dorset it’s easy to see why Iron Age man built a hill fort there: he could see his enemies miles away. A team from Edinburgh, Oxford and Cork universities says Britain and Ireland have 4,147 hill forts. Find your nearest hill fort and connect with ancient Britain at www.ahrc.ac.uk. BRITAIN’S snakes are under threat from a killer fungus previously found only in America, London Zoo experts tell Scientific Reports. Snake fungal disease has been discovered for the first time in UK grass snakes. The blight poses no known risk to humans or livestock but can kill snakes by causing skin lesions, scabs and crusty scales. MOTHS are helping to make smartphones and tablets easier to read in bright sunlight. Moths’ eyes are covered with tiny structures that stop light reflecting and alerting predators. So Central Florida University scientists have invented an anti-reflective film with tiny dimples to beat the glare, says the journal Optica. BIRDS’ eggs are shaped by their parents’ flying ability. The further they fly, the more streamlined the bird and the pointier the egg, Imperial College London researchers tell Science.
Owls, which have a light, gliding flight, have spherical eggs and sandpipers, which migrate thousands of miles, have pointy eggs.