The rabbits are out in Stansdale. At a young hour in the morning, they are wary at the passage to their tunnels, looking just as they are trying out for the TV adjustment of Watership Down.

50% of them are stoop and emerge against the dull soil which their burrowing has spread along the slope. The rest are so totally covered that they are verging on undetectable. My canine Buster, who is puzzled by seeing so much living hide, is especially irritated when a substantial lump of earth abruptly starts to scratch itself

A week after my first locating of the year, I was en route home to breakfast when I met a gathering of adolescents shielding from the downpour under one of the dry stone dividers which befuddle the fields of the Peak Park. They were perched on a wicker-crate - once an element of the piece of Sheffield in which I was conceived.

The Sheffield hampers did not contain Fortnum and Mason's Royal Ascot picnics. They were - if Saint Peter will excuse me - the indication of the anglers. At a young hour in the morning, their substance were live larvae, sandwiches and packaged lager. At night, they conveyed the day's catch.

Old codgers out with their mutts for a walk should say something feign and interesting to young people who cross their way. So indicating the limestone slope behind me, I recommended that few fish would nibble up there. The young people demonstrated entirely unfeeling to the magnificence of incongruity. 'We're not angling,' one said. 'We're ferreting.' His wicker crate shook as though to affirm his clarification.

They were indeed going to approach Stansdale with what the Oxford lexicon calls 'a half-tame mixture of the normal polecat' and desolate the rabbit-runs. I assume that the ferrets were to be placed in toward one side of the tunnels while the young people held up at the other - albeit, unless the predators trailed a skein of fleece behind them like Theseus in the maze, it is difficult to trust that they could ever discover out.