Category: David

The rat (main picture) is from a statue on a bridge in Berlin portraying St Gertrude, a seventh century nun whose powers include the ability to disperse plagues of rodents. She is also a patron saint of cat lovers, cat owners and their cats, gardeners, herbalists, farmlands, good lodgings, travellers, pilgrims, recently dead people, graves, poor people, widows and Nivelles, Belgium, where her nunnery was. The statue has rats and mice around the base, all polished as they are regularly fingered for luck by pedestrians passing that way.

Weathervanes

The cow (two pictures from different angles) is a Simmental bull, spotted in the Hinksford Mobile Home Park, seen from the canal towpath.

The elephant is just opposite the High Town terminus of the Bridgnorth Cliff Railway. The horse vane, and the sheep and lamb / pig and piglet fixtures are on houses near either end of the farm track which is a westward continuation of Castlecroft Road.

Doorknockers

Lions heads are common among doorknockers. These two were variations on the more usual patterns. The ram’s head came from Ludlow, and the bear from Warwick.

The mole – a cutout from a now lichen-covered metal – is from the elaborate gate of the former Wolverhampton Environmental Centre. It gives access to land the Council is currently proposing to sell for housing development.

Ape images, graffiti on supports of one of the railway viaducts crossing the Staffs & Worcs Canal as it passes between Aldersley and Oxley.

Not the Gornal legend: these pigs with personality were graffiti in a quiet street on the edge of Brussels, city of comics, some years ago.

Some garden ornaments, some gatepost decorations (an alternative to the usual lions or eagles) and a couple of bronze statues in the form of lambs and piglets.

Animated moose (or perhaps elk or reindeer) on one of the beer stalls in the Birmingham Frankfurt Christmas Market.

The larger than life-sized head was making a return after missing the last year or two.

It’s Christmas, so it’s time for a change of pace. The next few posts won’t be pictures of actual wildlife. Instead, they will be of portrayals of animals that have caught my eye on my travels.

For starters, the Birmingham Bull Ring bull. The statue gets a costume for the Christmas season.

Here is this year’s. For comparison, check out the earlier posts with the 2013 costume, and showing the bull unadorned.