PECULIAR POSTCARDS
The Sheldon Duck
9. THE SHELDON DUCK
Sheldon is a small village in the Derbyshire Peak District, situated to the west of Bakewell. It has a rather ordinarylooking church from 1864 and an ancient lead mine that flourished 250 years ago. The village’s major fortean claim to fame is a bizarre natural curiosity, however: ladies and gentlemen, may I present… The Sheldon Duck!
The story goes that back in 1601 some Sheldon villagers were out observing natural phenomena. One of them saw a duck flying over the village green and into the hollow of an ash tree. Since they did not see the bird emerge, they presumed that it had got trapped inside the tree trunk. The puzzled villagers scratched their heads in confusion and debated the strange tale of the disappearing duck at length. The duck in the ash tree became one of the main curiosities of Sheldon folklore, the tale of its strange demise passed down through several generations.
Fast forward nearly 300 years to May 1893. The Sheldon ‘duck tree’, as it was still called by the locals, now stood near the residence of Mr Harry Buxton. Since it had was overhanging the road and the bottom part had become partially decayed, it was decided to cut it down. Messrs Wilson & Son, the Ashford-in-the-Water joiners and the purchasers of the tree, had it transported to their timber yard. When the old tree was cut up, the lower portion was at first discarded, but it was later decided to cut it into two. There was much amazement when it turned out to contain the near-perfect image of a duck, complete with bill, head and wings.
It was concluded that the duck of 1601 really had flown into the tree and got stuck in a crevice in its trunk; as the centuries passed, the bird had slowly passed from the realm of ornithology to that of dendrology. A living duck, prematurely buried and surrounded by solid wood, had been reduced to an esoteric pattern inside the tree trunk. A further marvel was that there were marks of rot in the timber where it was presumed the duck’s brain, lights and liver had once been. The body of the bird measured 8in (20cm) across and 21in (53cm) long. “A Sheldon tradition, now nearly 300 years old, is verified!” exclaimed the delighted Derbyshire Times . Mr Samuel Ashton, of Ashford, bought the two boards with the duck and exhibited them to his friends. After being displayed at the local post office for some time, the boards with the duck were returned to the timber merchant, Mr Wilson, who polished them and mounted them in a mantelpiece in his home, Great Batch Hall in Church Street, Bakewell. This old and valuable house still exists, and so, presumably, do the curious boards with the imprint of the duck.
Already in 1923, a rationalist reared his ugly head, pointing out that the Sheldon Duck must have been “an accidental freak of growth”; there was a large stone at the British Museum, the pedant ‘JBW’ pontificated in the Derby Daily Telegraph, that held a marked resemblance to the head of the poet Chaucer, but no one suggested that the poet’s head had petrified after death. Sceptical naturalists have also scoffed at the old legend: was it normal for a duck to fly head first into a hole in an old tree, like some demented woodpecker, rather than to stick to its normal semi-aquatic habitat? And the image of the duck on the boards appears to be lacking both legs and a tail, organs the creature would surely have found most useful in its daily activities. Readers of FT are used to seeing unexpected natural images known as simulacra: tree branches resembling snakes, stones looking like the head of a troll, and cats resembling Adolf Hitler. This phenomenon is known by the rationalists as pareidolia: the misinterpretation of random images as pictures of some object or person. But even if it is just a chimaera, I still treasure my postcard of the Duck, sold in Ashford in the 1930s and a curious fortean image if ever there was one. Derbyshire Times, 27 May 1893, 16 Jan 1897; Derby Daily Telegraph, 1 Aug 1910, 1 Nov 1923; At the Edge 4 (Dec 1996); Peak Advertiser, 5 April 2004.