The menace in black velvet

Moles can do a lot of damage but they’ve paid for a few of Soldier Palmer’s pints

- M FRITH

During a lull between jobs as a teenager, I found work catching moles. For all that my friends laughed at me, it was not such a ridiculous career prospect in those days. A few friends were quietly envious of my income as it began to grow into the spring and it was not hard to find work anywhere from farms and golf courses to fancy gardens and livery yards.

I charged £5 a mole, which seemed to cover most of the expenses required to make it work for me. A good Duffus barrel mole trap cost around £5 and once I had enough cash to invest in a dozen at once, I was off.

At its best, mole catching is a great way to get out and about around the countryside, creeping up ditches and around the muddy margins in search of elusive runs where traps can be set. Once you have cracked some of the guiding principles, it can be relatively straightforward work.

The trick is to do it quickly, not least because it frees up your traps for a different job. Speed is also handy because if you mess the same mole around for any extended period of time, he will become suspicious and harder to trap. Get in, catch the mole, get out again — a good mole catcher can do it all in a matter of hours.

At first it was hard to work out how moles moved and where they went. A field full of molehills may only be the work of a single mole, but often there is a confusing mismatch of territories overlaying one another. In the breeding season, the males seem to skip between multiple territories and it becomes easier to catch two moles at once — an achievement I used to call a “double header”.