Has anyone seen the leaping hare                                                                                            Or of it did you hear?                                                                                                                 I was so lucky, I was there                                                                                                        When through the trees did peer                                                                                              To find out what had caught my eye                                                                                          As I drove past whilst on my way                                                                                              To Liverpool from Southport gay.                                                                                               Curious! But what? And why?

It was twenty years ago, at least; I was driving from my sister Doreen’s house in Southport to lodgings in New Brighton, and was on the outskirts of Thornton. You know how hard it is to stop the car mid journey. Remember the kids in the back, desperate to stop for the toilet, or something fascinating they’d seen? And would you stop? No. Not until threatened with instant urine or worse.

So I was well on my journey with no intention of stopping, when out of the corner of my eye, to the right of the road, I caught a glimpse. The most fleeting hundredths-of-a-second subliminal flicker of something ejecting from a field. What could it have been, I considered as I drove past.

A great effort of will stopped the car a mile past. If I don’t go back and look I’ll never know, and for the rest of my life I’ll wonder what it was that I saw. Or might have seen. So I did a Uee and parked by the field.

There was a sandstone wall a yard high with a typical triangular top, beyond which was a small field of say two or three acres: a meadow of overgrown grass bordered by a hawthorn hedge. Houses were nearby, and the traffic pottered past. Nothing to see, but I waited.

Then, Yes! Again, from a different part of the field, a leap! A leap from the covering grass! Into the air the height of a man, a hare! Up, then down and hidden. Then another! From a cricket-pitch away! A wide circle of hares, unseen on the ground, but briefly visible as they took random turns to become skybourne.

Somewhere in that ancient ritual were doe-hares in the centre of the circle; the males (I guessed twenty or so) mysteriously displaying their energy and power. But could the does see anything in the long grass? Who knows what does know, ha, a mystery!

A Parliament of Hares; a once-in-a-lifetime sight that I never thought to witness, and half considered to be a myth. So glad I turned back. I stayed for half an hour as the traffic noise and fume staged an incongruous background to a fabulous, mythical natural event, right there in front of me. And no-one else stopped to look! I felt strangely honoured to have been present at an animal-ceremony that so few have seen, and rather shocked that the hares were there in numbers, performing their ritual virtually right in the suburbs.

The hare is a peculiar, homeless creature, of solitary mysterious ways. How it survives in our unwelcoming environment, and even today stages its parliament despite the confines of urban sprawl, is a wonderful thing. Perennially persecuted, it persists.