Grotesque honour

SIR – Peter Saunders (Letters, April 24) writes of past stonemasons at Salisbury Cathedral.

In 1997 Master Mason Gordon Tucker retired after 48 years working at the cathedral. His retirement was marked for posterity when a two-bytwo block of stone was carved into a caricature – a grotesque – and installed high on the north-east corner of the tower.

This was the first grotesque carved for 150 years – a great honour for him and an acknowledgement of his long service to Salisbury Cathedral, or, as my children said when young, “Uncle Gordon’s big church”.

David Carrington

Swavesey, Cambridgeshire efficient new oil-fired system while they still could.

Sally Hargreaves

Benllech, Anglesey

SIR – It’s true that heat pumps are not the one-size-fits-all solution to replacing fossil-fuel boilers that the Government would have us believe, in its ill-thought-through race towards net zero.

Properties need to be well insulated, and have somewhere to put the heat pump in the first place, which could be a problem in many cases. They also need space for a hot water storage tank, which is not always available. They are definitely not cheap to install.

However, seven years ago I retrofitted a heat pump to the original central heating system in my 1970s house, without even changing the radiators. It has provided us with heating and hot water throughout every winter since then, including during the Beast from the East in 2018, without any problems at all.

Yes, it has to work harder in cold spells, but so does any other form of heating system. It categorically does not just stop working in these conditions, as some people have suggested. I am extremely pleased with how economical it is to run, and the models available now are even more efficient, and quieter than mine. Chris White

Kingsbridge, Devon