It is said that if you have a purse with a mole’s tail attached as a tassel, it will always be full. Moles and magic rituals seem to go well together. It is known among molecatchers that carrying a pair of dried mole hands will prevent rheumatism and protect you from evil; this superstition is found across Europe. Witches love moles as familiars, perhaps because they are dark and secretive. Mole blood and organs can give a person the power of divination if they swallow a fresh, still-beating mole heart (according to Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia), and holding a mole in your hands until it dies will give you healing powers. Various mole body parts have the power to cure epilepsy, prevent toothache and ague, control fits and remove warts. Molecatchers of old could make a pretty good extra living by dealing in these ‘natural remedies’, and were sometimes regarded as ‘cunning men’, vagrant male witches who appeared when the moles did and left when they were gone, taking their secret knowledge with them.
THERE ARE WHITE moles and golden moles in Europe, but they are rare: it is said that if you catch one you will die within the month. I have never caught one. One of the molecatching societies gives you a special badge if you send them a photo of yourself with a white mole. I have the standard gold-plated badge.
In Europe we have just one variety of mole. In Ireland, just as there are no snakes, there are no moles. During the last ice age most of Europe was covered, but as the ice melted about 7,000 years ago the animals moved north following the melt. Many animals did not reach Ireland before the sea levels rose and Ireland became an island.
Across the world there are numerous varieties of mole, most of them similar if not indistinguishable from Talpa europaea. North America has seven species: the hairy-tailed mole, eastern mole, broad-footed mole, Townsend’s mole, the coast mole, the American shrew mole and the star-nosed mole.
The eastern mole is the most common in the United States, ranging east of the Rocky Mountains from Michigan all the way down to southern Texas. The hairy-tailed mole, as its name suggests, has a hairy tail unlike the others and is darker in colour.
The shrew mole is the only mole in America that doesn’t have large digging hands. He doesn’t make molehills; instead he digs shallow surface tunnels in the leaf litter in the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest where he is common. He is the only mole that can put his feet flat on the ground and can climb trees and bushes to look for food. He is often mistaken for a shrew as he is the smallest of the moles, being only four inches long including his long, thin tail.
Townsend’s mole is the largest North American mole, reaching nearly ten inches in length including his short tail and weighing up to 5oz. The star-nosed mole lives in wet and swampy areas of North America, foraging for beetles and invertebrates at the bottom of streams and swamps. He is slightly larger than the European mole, and with his massive hands looks very similar, but has a longer, thicker tail. The most obvious difference is the ‘star’ about half an inch across at the tip of his nose, which he uses to feel his way around and detect his prey. A mole’s nose has very specific vibration-sensitive organs, and in the star-nosed mole these have developed into twenty-two pink fingers that look and move very much like a sea anemone: they can detect, catch and eat their prey faster than the human eye can follow. Star-nosed moles build tunnels that often end underwater. The Russian desman is another aquatic mole. He looks very unmole-like: he has webbed feet and a long tail, and lives in family groups in burrows on riverbanks. Again he is blind, has a very mole-like sensitive snout, and is the heaviest of the mole family at up to 18oz and up to 16 inches in length including his tail, which is as long as his body. Due to the desman population’s having been decimated by the fur trade, it is now a protected species in Russia.
On a tiny island of Japan called Uotsuri, less than two miles wide, there lives an almost mythical mole known as the Senkaku mole. This mole was first identified in 1979 when scientists visited the island: one of them saw something moving in the grass, hit it with a slipper and took it home. This dead female Senkaku mole is the only one ever recorded, as, due to a conflict between China and Japan about ownership of the island, nobody is allowed to land there.
There are things that look like moles that are not moles, and things that don’t look like moles that are – nature repeats itself and uses what it has to fill any gaps. New Zealand famously has no native mammals apart from bats and marine mammals such as porpoises, but Australia has the marsupial mole, which is not an actual mole but certainly looks and behaves like one. It burrows underground in desert areas with massive front hands, is golden in colour, and has a pouch for its young which, uniquely, faces backwards so that it does not fill up with sand. There are other moles that are not moles: mole crickets and mole crabs, the naked mole-rats in East Africa that are insensitive to pain, and all-female populations of mole-salamanders in North America.
You will find moles throughout our landscape, in our mythology, poetry and literature. Moles, apart from the Russian desman, are solitary animals. Despite this, the delightful Mole in The Wind in the Willows becomes friends with Rat, Toad and Badger in this loveliest of all books. Perhaps we cannot help but anthropomorphise the creatures that we do not eat.
In other stories, too, moles appear as far from solitary. Lilygloves in The Chronicles of Narnia is a fine gardener and the leader of a warrior group of talking moles. Duncton Wood, a romantic story about an ancient empire of moles who worship standing stones in Oxfordshire, is full of battles and escapades. In any number of children’s books the mole and his friends have a variety of adventures. Perhaps it is hard for humans to write stories about being alone.
In February 1702 William III, also known as William of Orange, was riding his horse Sorrel in Richmond when Sorrel stumbled on a molehill and threw the king to the ground, where he broke his collarbone with fatal consequences: he succumbed to pneumonia and died the following month. Fourteen years earlier, the Protestant William and his queen, Mary, had deposed the ruling Catholic King James II of England and VII of Scotland. However, many factions in England, Scotland, Ireland and further abroad were supporters of the deposed James, and this gave rise to the Jacobite toast to the mole, ‘To the little gentleman in black velvet’, which is still occasionally heard today. There is a wonderful bronze statue in St James’s Square, London: William, dressed in flowing classical robes, is riding proudly, every inch the victorious king, his horse’s head held back and high with flowing mane and, just by his left rear hoof, there is a little molehill.
A dawn hillside
looking down into the valley
no pathways or desire lines
I’m walking the field edges
which trace the stream’s meander
today’s thick frost
could hold a cat’s paw
trees and grey sheep still and mute
wait for warmth and light
with dripping leaves and fleeces
the icy air condenses and drips from my moustache
it tastes of snow and rotting leaves
cold air jellies on this old spade’s splitting handle
and softens to slush as my hands lose heat
its worn grey T-bar matches
the callouses on my hand
without it I am useless
my body is working
my mind is idling
man-shaped, pig-like
I’m snuffling, bent
I’m leaving booted footprints
in the crystalline grass
and I want to swim
to hang motionless
alone in a loch
my back tattooed with clouds
with seagulls squeaky
wheeling overhead.