MIKE HALLOWELL: Smelt Like Tyne Spirit

Brilliant! Great, eh? Spiffing! Amazing! Smelt are back in the River Tyne! I couldn't believe it! Good old smelt!

Mind you, I didn't know exactly what a smelt was, but its great to have them back anyway. Smelt and chips! Fried smelt and onions!

Seemingly, at one time the River Tyne was filled with smelt, had smelt coming out of its ear holes. Then they took the hump at the pollution and went somewhere else. Probably the Wear. But now they're back, and we Geordies have something to sing about.

Apparently, officers from the Environment Agency – God bless 'em, I say – had a quick plodge in the river to see if there were any other Swimming Things in the water other than salmon, dolphins and the odd leviathan or two. And indeedy-doody there was – bucketfuls of smelt.

Now the smelt is a funny old fish. It's not economy-sized – only reaching 25cm on a good day, apparently – and has a nice silvery set of scales. However, the interesting thing is that vegetarians and vegans can eat smelt without getting a guilty conscience. Why? I hear you ask, pray tell me!

Well, it's like this. The smelt looks like an ordinary fish, but is most peculiar in as much as it smells distinctly like cucumber (seriously). This means that if vegetarians and vegans shut their eyes they can pretend that they're actually eating cucumber and delude themselves into thinking that its okay. Now I'm the first to admit that there are one or two minor flaws with this theory, the main one being that the smelt is not really a cucumber, but a fish. To get around this difficulty I am going to propose that we reclassify the smelt taxonomically as a vegetable. Let's face it, it wouldn't be the first time.

Take the Chinese, for instance. (On second thoughts, don't take them; there are bloody millions of them and in any case where would we put them?). The Chinese eat this thing called a sea cucumber, which is an echinoderm of the Holothuroidea class. It's actually a slug-type thingie, but if zillions of Chinese people call it a cucumber then they can't all be wrong, can they? The Chinese also eat this delicious stuff called crispy seaweed. Except that it's not seaweed. Its cabbage. Or sometimes lettuce.

My point is that if we can call all these other things something they're not then why can't we do it with the smelt? My mate smelt a smelt (sorry) once, and he reckons that it really does smell like cucumber. However, to differentiate between smelt and, say, a sea cucumber we need to call it something else. I was thinking of something like a Sea Onion, a Sea Croissant or a Sea Cheesecake. It's not very conventional, admittedly, but it is creative.

Anyway, whatever the reason for their departure the smelt are now back in the Tyne, cucumber fragrance and all. I'd be interested to hear of any other animals that are called things that they're not, like the sea lion, which doesn't look like a lion at all to me, although it does look unnervingly like my paternal great-grandfather. I think this is probably just a coincidence, though, as you'll see by the photograph that accompanies this blog.

GLEN VAUDREY: The mermaid and the smelt

Glen is one of the newer additions to the bloggo family. He wrote to me out of the blue last year to ask wherther we wanted a Western Isles volume in our Mystery Animals of Britain series. We argeed that we did indeed want one, and commissioned him. What we were not expecting was such a bloody good writer and all round nice guy, who - by the way - is writing several other volumes for us...

The still waters of Rostherne Mere can be found lying between the stately homes of Dunham Massey and Tatton Park at the northern end of the county of Cheshire on the outskirts of Greater Manchester. The waters of this mere were recorded in 1905 as reaching down to a maximum depth of 103.5 feet with its widest part coming in at 3,750 feet; being fully land locked and on the small side you would not really expect that it would harbour much in the way of mystery animals, but sometimes things are not always what they seem.

The most well known tales attached to this lake are those concerning the appearance of a mermaid that frequents the Mere each Easter Sunday when she sets about ringing a church bell that unfortunately found its way into the mere. The story goes that in the dim and distant past there happened to be a travelling bell maker who for reasons known only to himself cursed the new bell the he was taking to Rostherne church, as happened in those quondam days divine retribution wasn’t far behind and the bell maker’s cursing saw both him and his new bell falling into the depths of the mere in some not easily explained accident.

The reports of the mermaid in themselves ask a number of questions, with the mere being inland and many miles from the sea it is hard to place the creature sighted as an out of place mystery seal, but not impossible I might add. After all it was only around a hundred years ago that a seal made it to nearby Warrington by swimming up the River Mersey. Which of course leads us nicely to an old local tradition that states that Rostherne Mere is connected to either the Irish Sea or the River Mersey by means of a subterranean passage, perhaps it is this mystery link that has aided the travel arrangements of this mystery finned campanologist.

While talk of an underground link to the sea may at first sound nothing more than fanciful mediaeval superstition there is possibly some truth to it because there used to be reports of another animal in the waters of the mere that strongly hint to there once being a connection to the Mersey. For until the 1920s Rostherne Mere played host to a population of fresh water smelt.

Traditionally the smelt is an estuarine fish spending August to May in fresh water but returning to the sea after spawning at the beginning of April. Due to possessing a tolerance for low salinities the smelt has been able to adapt itself to live continually in fresh water when a population has found itself cut off from the routes back to the sea, such is the case with those smelt found in the lakes in Scandinavia. It was claimed Rostherne Mere was unique in the United Kingdom in playing host to this species of fresh water smelt, sadly however this claim can no long be supported as the last specimen was caught in 1922 and with it the smelt of Rostherne Mere disappeared into the history books.

Of course there is one last big question that has to be asked, just how the mermaid manages to work out when the moveable feast of Easter is due each year.