THE TIMES (London, UK) 19 April 08 The demented world of newts - There's a lot of life lurking about in the dark rim of Peterborough (Simon Barnes)
It pains me to write these words. I mean that quite literally: sitting at a computer is seriously uncomfortable. That's because I ricked my back researching this column. Normally, when my back goes, it's because of something reasonably dashing and adventurous. A couple of years ago, I did it falling off a young horse I was schooling; last year I did it in the course of saving the rainforest.
Well, this time I did it in pursuit of newts. No, I didn't fall off a newt, nor did a newt turn and savage me or throw me to the ground. It's just the sort of thing that can happen when you lurk about in the dark on the rim of Peterborough. I was paying a visit to the excellent charity, Froglife, which concerns itself with amphibians and reptiles. Among plenty of other work, Froglife manages Hampton Nature Reserve, which is possibly the strangest landscape in lowland Britain. Its 300 acres contain more than 300 ponds, and the place is jumping with newts.
There are wild areas in this country, surreal, rather lawless places where people seldom go. You find them on the fringes of towns, on the fringes of industrial estates, by intersections of roads and railways, where windblown litter and fly-tippers compete with the spontaneous colonisation of wild things.
The Peterborough rim is such a place: between warehouses and outbreaks of light industry these badlands can be found. But right in the middle is a stretch of ancient industrial wasteland that has been designated a nature reserve. It is a wild and sinister place. It was used once for the extraction of clay for bricks. The process created a bizarre ridge-and-furrow landscape: but the ridges are 50 feet high and the furrows are filled with water. And, of course, newts.
This is the national stronghold for great crested newts: smooth newts also wiggle and squirm here wherever they can. Join me then: with a party of newt-hunters, not one of them even remotely like Ken Livingstone or Gussie Fink-Nottle. We set off together on to the surface of the Moon.
This is a landscape shaped by humans, but with no thought of human convenience. There is no human logic, no human rhythm: just a series of precipitous slopes slippery as glass, all of them leading inexorably to a pond. From the edge of these ponds, the city lights glows bizarrely above the level of the ridges. Above the traffic's hum, the occasional cry of bird: the honk of greylag geese and the oboeing of lapwings, birds that love the wild and the wet.
We made our way around the fringes of these mad ponds, shining a billion-candlepower light at their surfaces and revealing the mysteries below: scurrying beetles, voracious dragonfly larvae: and every now and then, newts. They are creatures caught between land and water, lovers of the damp and the dark, wriggling their feathery tails in the lamplight, seeking mates, laying eggs, making newts. The Froglife people were conducting their annual survey: in the winter, intense management work keeps this wild place wet and newt-friendly.
There is a strange beauty in this demented place, in these strange creatures, for nature is not all light and prettiness. It is also dark and mysterious and unknowable, and it takes places in the strangest of places. It is always good to be reminded of this, to see it, hear it, touch it. I returned to the familiar world, my body thrown drastically out of true by the crazy scrambling on these uneasy slopes: but my mind and heart reunited with the wild. Again.
The demented world of newts

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