NAMED a hedgehog champion by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds – an organisation clearly spreading its wings – transport secretary Chris Grayling is considering road signs wordlessly urging greater care. Barningham’s beaten him to it.

Barningham’s south of the A66 near Barnard Castle, an attractive village so close to the county boundary that part of the cricket field is in Durham and part in North Yorkshire.

The hedgehog signs went up in May 2016, paid for by villager Margaret Heslop. “I was just fed up of seeing so many squished hedgehogs around here,” she says.

“Maybe Barningham has more than its share of worms, maybe it hasn’t so many badgers. People were a bit sceptical, but people generally are.”

Stats support her concern, Britain’s hedgehog population said to have fallen from 30 million in 1950 to around a million today. Part of the problem, says the Hedgehog Preservation Society, is that the poor things don’t have much of a flight instinct.

“They just curl up in a ball and wait for the danger to go away. If the danger’s a car, their prickles aren’t much defence.”

Margaret admits that the initiative may not have been 100 per cent successful – “I saw quite a few squished hedgehogs last summer”.

Though the lady of this house supposed that the hedgehogs on the sign looked a bit fierce – she also reckoned that hedgehogs like little better than a can of Whiskas – a three mile walk along the back road from Barningham westward to the hamlet of Scargill revealed not a tiggywinkle.

The same may not be said of frogs, following nature’s instincts at this time of year and flattened in large numbers.

Near Egglestone, a few miles away, toad signs – the lady thought their back legs too long – have long urged motorists to proceed with caution. We went up there, too, but no evidence – dead or alive – of amorous amphibians.

A grayling, they reckon, can be either a butterfly or a fish, the latter said to be a bottom feeder. It’s all very confusing.

LAST week’s column on Lady Sybil Eden, mother of a future Prime Minister, stirred memories for Brian Dixon in Darlington of one of Sir Anthony’s less likely claims to fame. He was fourth in a long list of Englishmen (and women) in Norwegian commentator Bjorge Lillelein’s immortally excitable summary after England’s 2-1 World Cup defeat by Norway in 1981. Readers are invited to remember the others. Answer at the foot of the page.

LIKE the April 3 column, 79-year-old Cyril Wilson from Delves Lane, Consett, had spent Easter Sunday in Weardale, though with higher aspirations.

Cyril and an 84-year-old friend walked to 2,300ft above St John’s Chapel, though snow meant that they were unable to find the rock in the shape of a seat where John Wesley is supposed to have sat when first visiting the dale.

“A lovely prospect,” his journal noted in 1770, and two years later he was back. “It being very cold, I judged it better to preach in the house,” he wrote. It was June.

The “house” was High House chapel at Ireshopeburn, earmarked for closure in October and with the adjoining Weardale Museum also at risk.

Cyril and friend visited both. “Tell your readers to visit before it’s too late,” he says. “In my eyes they’re better than Beamish.”

JOHN WINTERBURN in Darlington draws attention to a splendid moment on ITV’s regional news when a reporter carrying a jar of six sugar cubes was asking folk of the dangers of over-indulgence.

She approached a young lad, probably one of Newcastle’s finest. Did he know that most people exceeded their safe sugar limit by 11am?

“It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I don’t get up until 12.”

NOTHING may be more memorable, however, than Jeff Brown’s interview on the other side with Jonathan Noble, the Newcastle team member whose answer to a University Challenge question about Pascal’s Triangle won worldwide admiration.

Jeff, top bloke, tried manfully to get to the point – possibly all three. His guest talked of binominal expansion and other abstruse ideas. Jeff, who has an A grade in GCE maths, went round in triangles.

“The more he explained the more confused I became,” he admits. “I think he could tell by the look on my face.”

The Look North man finally had his mathematical moment, throwing back a question learned (it transpires) from former Gateshead council leader Mick Henry.

If 100 people at a party all clinked glasses at the same time, how many clinks would there be? University challenged, Noble was first wildly out and then much closer.

The clink tank formula is n x n-1 divided by two, when n is the number of people at the table. The answer’s 4,950.

WE’D written about the Bevin Boys exhibition at the Mining Art Gallery in Bishop Auckland, noting that the “press-ganged” pitmen were given boots and compressed cardboard safety helmets but expected to buy the rest of their kit with their clothing coupons.

Bill Bartle, now in Barnard Castle, appears unsympathetic. “Ordinary miners weren’t even given safety helmets until the 1960s, when they became compulsory by law,” he writes. “We still had to buy our clothes and boots.”

Most Bevin Boys didn’t work at the coal face, adds Bill. “Compare that with my dad who was forced to go down the pit – there was nothing else – in the 1920s.

“Most of his life, including the war years, was spent at the coal face, his health broken by the time he retired.

“His ‘badge of honour’ was a certificate from the Coal Board marking 47 years' service. If the Bevin Boys were heroes, what was my dad?”

A FEW weeks back we wrote of Sarah Nattrass, 44, the former retained firefighter at Stanhope who’s now assistant chief officer with County Durham Fire and Rescue Service.

It reminded David Walsh – at the time – of something he swears these columns carried, again on his telling, back in the 1980s.

The guy who was the Durham brigade’s assistant chief back then took an early morning call from an irate councillor for the Sherburn Hill area. He’d heard alarming news on the radio.

Why hadn’t he been told, he demanded? Why had no one advised of the nuclear danger on his doorstep?

Perhaps fortunately, the councillor’s daughter had overheard the conversation and waved the morning paper in front of him. It wasn’t Sherburn Hill, it was Chernobyl.

LAST week’s column recalled my old Aunty Betty’s use of the curious phrase “Jump up and give your leg a dother”. The Oxford simply defines “dother” as a dialect form of “dodder” and dodder as to tremble or to shake.

Eric Gendle in Middlesbrough remembers his mother – Boro born but Durham roots - using the same expression but always the plural, legs. If not unique, Aunty Betty was distinctly singular.

All things being equal, Eric also wonders if any word more succinctly containing all five vowels than equation?

SO finally back to Bjorge Lillelein. “Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana… can you hear me Maggie? Your boys took a hell of a beating.”