I HAVE never seen a living badger but, sadly, in the last fortnight I've spotted at least six lying dead by the roadside. There are four on the A167 between Darlington and Northallerton alone, including one great big chap who flopped down, like a giant cuddly pyjama case, on the path outside someone's front door at Dalton-on-Tees.

A fresh kill, I stopped my bike to inspect him, his feet curled, his teeth bared, and his fur black, white, and silvery-grey with a vivid shriek of violent red on his chest where he'd been hit.

As I cycled off, I wondered what the householder would do with 15kg of dead badger on their doorstep. You couldn't just let it lie there, but I noticed that another carcase on a country verge near Barton had mysteriously disappeared overnight. Perhaps it was dragged away by a carnivore, although there is a belief that a badger's grieving partner buries the body in a strange badger funeral.

The Badger Trust estimates that 50,000 badgers are killed each year on Britain's roads, and I guess that rather than there being a badger suicide squad on the loose, they are on the look out for mates as February and March is their main breeding season.

The word "badger" only came into use in the early 16th Century – before then, they'd been called "broc", an ancient word from Celtic and Gaelic meaning "grey".

In Durham they were known by the local word for "grey" which was "pate". In Victorian times, an area in Castle Eden Dene, near Peterlee, was known as Pate Priest's Gill because a hermit priest had once lived there surrounded by badgers – the Ordnance Survey maps now call it Priest's Gill.

The Oxford English Dictionary says "badger" comes from the word "badge", which was a heraldic symbol that a knight and his followers wore on their armour to distinguish them in battle, and a badger's stripes do indeed mark him out.

However, every other source says that "badger" comes from a French word "bêcheur", which means "digger", as badgers are always digging – to find the hundreds of earthworms they consume every night, and to build the sets in which they live for generations (I was once shown a set as big as a skateboard bowl in the Shildon area which had apparently been inhabited since the 19th Century).

"Set" is another comparatively modern word. Before it came into use, everyone knew that a badger lived in a burrow or an earth. The first recorded use of "set" was in 1898 in a book by Sir Alfred Edward Pease, grandson of the Pease whose statue stands in Darlington. Sir Alfred hunted everything, from foxes to lions, and he enjoyed digging for badgers near his home of Pinchinthorpe at the foot of the Cleveland Hills, pulling them out of their sets with his badger-tongs.

He also hunted out Yorkshire dialect words, publishing a dictionary of them in 1927, so that may be where he found the word "set", which is now the accepted home of the badger.

Sir Alfred came from a time when man killed animals like badgers for fun, although even he regarded badger-baiting – when dogs are set on the brock which has had is lower jaw cut off to even up the bait – as "a cruel and brutalising sport". We have, of course, come a long way since then – now we only kill them with our cars and cull them with Government approval. Such is progress.