NO-ONE is quite sure when rabbits first appeared in this country, with some experts believing they were introduced from Spain in the latter half of the thirteenth century, others suggesting they arrived from France in the twelfth century and yet more claiming they were present during Roman times and reared in gardens called leporaria.

Another possibility is that they were introduced to this country by the Normans some time after the invasion of 1066.

Beyond doubt is the fact they rapidly established themselves and multiplied as only rabbits can do. During medieval times they were considered extremely valuable because they provided both food and fur clothing for the ever-expanding population.

So useful were they that special warrens were established to ensure the regular and controlled breeding of rabbits. Their meat was especially favoured by the wealthy classes, so the nobility appointed men called warreners to supervise their stock of rabbits.

Reminders of that post live on in the surname of Warren, Warrener or Warriner and local farms and cottages continue to use that name - High Warren, Low Warren and Warren Farm are found in numerous locations.

The idea of managing the production of rabbits in warrens persisted from about 1200 until well into the eighteenth century, although there were changes due to the decline of the feudal system.

Other changes derived from the enclosure of land and the emergence of a class of farmer known as the yeomen who owned and farmed their own properties.

As hawthorn hedges began to pattern the countryside as the land was enclosed, so rabbits, hitherto largely confined to their warrens, began to explore and find new homes.

Hawthorn hedges provided shelter and their roots permitted them to burrow easily into earth beneath.

Rabbits soon became categorised as pests as they spread and multiplied in the countryside, and the value and use of warrens therefore declined.

Most of the changes occurred prior to the eighteenth century, while heralding that major adjustment in the status of the rabbit. Whereas it had been bred for food and fur, once being highly popular as a meat among the upper classes, it was now becoming troublesome.

Its own demand for food had a devastating result on crops, not only root crops but even grass, and this led to the creation of rabbit clearance societies.

There was a brief revival of warrens in the nineteenth century, however, as country people moved into the towns and cities to find work.

Once again, rabbits provided a source of cheap and ready food, but no longer did they find favour with the upper classes - rabbits were now regarded as meat for the working classes and the poor and some were even targeted by poachers.

Perhaps the final humiliation arrived in 1954 when the rabbit was declared a pest under the Pest Act. This statute said that the responsibility for controlling rabbits rested with the occupier of the land.

Although rabbits continue to be used as food, often sold as oven-ready, their decline as a major source of food accelerated about 1960 and has never recovered.

Much of this decline could be attributed to the dreadful scourge of myxomatosis which, when it first appeared in this country in October, 1953, wiped out more than 90pc of the wild rabbit population.

But rabbits have always recovered from disasters, whether man-made or natural, and although many were killed by this disease others managed to survive to breed youngsters who were immune to myxomatosis.

Today, rabbits, with natural enemies like foxes and stoats, continue to be regarded as agricultural pests, causing damage to crops amounting to many millions of pounds per year.

Despite this, those warrens of the past are now attracting interest as sites of historic interest. I have no record of all the former warrens in this region, but in 1331 there was one at Dringhouses, near York.

The huge Dalby Forest on the North York Moors was the site of another warren owned by the Duchy of Lancaster. It was then known as the Dalby Warren and extended to some 3,000 acres, allowing hundreds of rabbits to be caught daily.

A map of Wensleydale still shows a rabbit warren near Lady Hill above the River Ure between Woodhall and Carperby, and another surviving warren near Leicester, dating from 1280, contains special breeding chambers and nesting places made from stone slabs.

A few years ago this was also afforded the status of Ancient Monument. That category now also applies to the former Dalby Forest warren and to another in Bedfordshire which was constructed in the thirteenth century by Augustinian monks to provide them with meat and pelts.

I am sure there are more in this region, some probably still being used by our modern generation of rabbits.

These notes resulted from correspondence in November when a Bainbridge reader asked if I had any record of stoats being bred for their ermine near Lady Hill in Wensleydale.

My own notes failed to reveal such a breeding establishment, but I have now received a letter from a West Burton reader who offers an alternative solution.

She tells me that her father, who would be in his late Eighties if he were still alive, often talked about a commercial rabbit warren near Lady Hill. Although she understands he had never seen it for himself, he had been told about it in his younger days and recalled that some of the rabbits were either silver or blue-grey, being bred especially for their pelts.

She believes that older readers in the Carperby or Aysgarth area might have similar recollections and did raise the possibility that any stoats, white or otherwise, might have been attracted to the area by the prospect of lots of rabbits.

In my research into medieval rabbit warrens, I discovered that rabbits with unusual colours in their fur were sometimes introduced to a warren in an attempt to prevent poaching.

If a warren specialised in, say, blue-grey rabbits rather than the normal grey-brown, then if a poacher was caught with such a rabbit or merely its skin in his possession, it was obvious it had been taken from that place.

In time, of course, many of these variously-coloured rabbits adapted to the wild and, even today, black rabbits are not uncommon in many parts of the country.

I thank my two correspondents for comments on this interesting subject.

Another reader has written from Skipton in Airedale as a result of my notes about the harvest moon. She has provided a list of other moon names, one for each month of the year.

I have never encountered this list and repeat it here for the amusement of readers - January: old moon; February: wolf moon; March: Lenten moon; April: egg moon; May: milk moon; June: flower moon; July: hay moon; August: grain moon; September: fruit moon; October: harvest moon; November: hunters' moon; December: moon before Yule.

This might be the moment to mention the blue moon. The phrase "once in a blue moon" means something which occurs very infrequently and the moon can appear to be blue on occasions. This is due to minute particles of dust in the upper atmosphere. They block the light from the red end of the spectrum and scatter it at the blue end. The reflected light from the sun shines through these particles to give the moon a blue appearance when seen from Earth. Or so I am led to believe!

From time to time, one hears reference to someone being cuddy-handed or even gallack-handed.

This is an old North Riding dialect term which means left-handed, but I understand that in the West Riding, the word was kay-dollock. A left-handed person was a kay-dollocker or even cod-handed, but my same source suggests that, in Whitby, a left-handed person was known as gawk-handed.

I can remember, as a child, people who were described as gawky, but this did not mean left-handed. It meant they were clumsy or perhaps awkward-looking, such as someone who was very tall and thin, or very clumsy with their feet or hands