Well I'll be! Is that a wallaby?

MANY are convinced that ferocious jungle beasts secretly prowl the North Staffordshire countryside.

But while reported sightings of big cats are not uncommon, they tend not to be supported by conclusive evidence.

The existence on the moors of Australian marsupials was never in doubt, however. Improbable, certainly, but an undisputed fact.

These photographs, taken nearly 30 years ago, prove that the famous Roches wallabies were as real as the rocky landscape they inhabited.

For six decades, the shy creatures made their home on the Roches.

The red-necked Tasmanian wallabies, part of a collection of animals brought to the area by landowner Captain Courtney Brocklehurst, of Swythamley Hall, were released into the wild at the start of the Second World War.

Along with yaks, llamas and emus, they had been evacuated to the Moorlands from Whipsnade Zoo.

Captain Brocklehurst was later killed in action in Burma but, against all expectations, the herbivores from Oz not only survived, but seemed to find the Roches a congenial habitat.

Fifty animals were set free in 1940, and as late as the 1960s the colony numbered 70 or 80. Although the population declined during the winter of 1962-63, it was back into the high teens by the 1970s and 1980s.

Throughout their years on the moors, the wallabies' greatest enemy was not the climate, however, but man.

Timid and nocturnal, they may have been the victims of the huge increase in tourism in the Peak Park.

Some were killed by falling off cliffs, and others died in traffic accidents, although one zoologist said these sad deaths were probably caused by the wallabies running in fear.

In the 1960s, they were cruelly hounded by men with dogs and guns – "the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable," as Oscar Wilde said of foxhunters.

In 1979, the Peak Park bought the area of land around the Roches that had been colonised by the marsupials, the aim being to provide them with a safer environment.

But after the 1990s, sightings became rarer and rarer, and Peak Park rangers admitted a few years ago that the colony might now be extinct.

Walkers no longer glimpse them from a distance, and gone are the days when astonished motorists would report to Leek police having "caught a kangaroo in their headlights" while driving at night on the Buxton road.

Did you ever see one of the Roches wallabies? Write to Colette Warbrook, including a contact telephone number and address, at Features Desk, The Sentinel, Forge Lane, Etruria, Stoke-on-Trent, ST1 5SS, or email colette.warbrook@thesentinel.co.uk