THIS weekend is the 131st Barnard Castle Meet – an event that started in 1885 as a gathering for cyclists but has now grown into a three-day extravaganza.

This year is the 60th anniversary of the first meet procession, and so rather than appoint a meet queen to oversee affairs, the organisers have invited back all previous years' queens – apparently, they've got 15 of them so far. To celebrate the anniversary, we thought a dip into our archives was in order to find a few older meet queens, and then we couldn't resist the picture from the 1993 meet of a bear taking an unscheduled dip in the water.