LAST week in this space, I was singing the praises of the skylark, both as a harbinger of spring and as a tasty morsel.

Then I moved onto something else. A copy of The Northern Echo from November 1914 fell open, and a headline leapt out: I presumed at first that something had gone wrong when someone was out skylarking.

The Northern Echo:

In late Victorian times, skylarkers went out skylarking in the dead of night armed with a lantern and a net. They crept across the fields, catching the skylarks as they slept.

Sackloads of two-ounce carcases, still warm, were thrown onto a train and sent to the meat markets in London.

In October 1894, the Bishop of Durham, the Right Reverend Brooke Westcott, opened the Shildon Canary, Cagebird, Pigeon, Rabbit and Poultry Society show and used the stage in the Co-operative Hall to condemn the “cruel destruction” of skylarks that he had witnessed in the capital, where up to 40,000 two ounce birds were sold each day for human consumption.

We’d been eating the larks for centuries.

There was a saying in the 16th Century that paradise was a land where the lark falls ready roasted from the sky.

But “fatal skylarking” referred to another aspect of the larking that I hadn’t considered.

Indeed, the story began: “Some sharp comments on skylarking amongst pitmen in the mine with electricity were made at an inquest yesterday.”

Of course, what larks! Skylarking about means having fun and jolly japes. It is a nautical expression that was first recorded at the start of the 19th Century when seamen used it to mean “wanton play about the rigging and tops”. I presume that because a skylark flies so steeplingly high – 1,000ft above its nest – to sing, sailors flitting foolishly about in the rigging must also have looked like dots in the sky.

The skylarking at the Willy Pit, Annfield Plain, was extremely foolish. A group of miners tried to skylark the donkeyman, Joseph Westgarth, by wiring up the sneck on the stable door to the mains. Before Westgarth arrived, one of the skylarkers, Joseph Wells of New Kyo, tried out the trick. He touched the sneck, shouted out as the voltage surged through him, and was welded to the iron fitting on the donkeyhouse door.

“When the current was cut, Wells dropped to the ground and almost immediately expired,” said the Echo. No larks at all.

CONTINUING the bird theme, here’s a factoid that was published in The Northern Echo on April 10, 1873. Can it possibly be true?

I’VE never understood why a shuggyboat is a shuggyboat, but while larking about among the archives, I spotted a report from July 21, 1890, that may explain it. It said a four-year-old boy in West Hartlepool required stitches when he was struck violently on the head by a swinging “machine in motion”.

The report said that the incident once more demonstrated “the danger of the popular shuggledy-shoe”.