'This is a wonderful job because you meet extraordinary characters'

It has been an exceptionally wild night. Not as in shots, shenanigans and all sorts of mischief but as in the raw rage of nature with Storm Eleanor ripping across the high Cumbrian fells with elemental and bough-breaking savagery.

Even with Eleanor shifting her full bulk eastwards, the old girl's tail still holds a stinging blast of wind as Nicky Richards snail-paces his 4x4 behind first lot as they make their way through the village of Greystoke and up towards the high ground of the gallops, the hair of the girls on the horses streaming wild in the wind.

Richards pulls the big grey Merc to a stop, better to fix in the mind the view of Greystoke Castle, ancestral home to Tarzan, that lies nestled in a lee free of the blast of most gales – though not this one, which has about it that unremitting force familiar to some trawlerman butting his way towards Iceland in search of cod and pollock.