While recently perusing unread books gathering dust on my shelves, one tome caught my eye and, upon being loosed from the grip of neglect, fell open to a random page from which leapt the following sentence: "The ancestors of a critical and growing mass of present-day Americans existed in dung heaps of humanity amidst rotting vegetables."

As both a physical and a metaphysical beast, the grass snake has inhabited our imaginations and (as it turns out) our dung heaps in equal measure.

The young will inherit the political dung heap snowballing to even greater dimensions today in Parliament and at the national-dialogue table.

Complete with a big red tractor, cockerel, duck, farm cat and even a dung heap! Create a land of fun and farmyard frolics in the back garden.

Drugs were stored in a dung heap outside a factory mixing and preparing illegal narcotics at Coppice Farm on Blakeston Lane, Stockton.

Sources say Hurley hubby Arun Nyar is sniffy about Liz's latest publicity project, a fly-on-the dung heap TV documentary series about her Gloucestershire organic farm.

There is so much on offer for the whole family - high speed screams on brilliant rides such as Rita and Oblivion or family fun at the new Dung Heap adventure playground and Extraordinary Golf.

Compost heaps are little more than a 21st Century version of the medieval dung heap and are guaranteed to attract rats, a recent programme about a family going green showed the man of the house urinating on his!

I found his statement genuine and appealing: "If you want me to call students to lives of sacrifice and catalyzing change in the slums, then you'll have to convince me that it's the right thing to do." God answered him in a dream, like his Old Testament heroes, in which he saw his own children sitting on a dung heap. God said to him, "As their father, are you satisfied?

I suppose, too, that the increasing number of our more ethical members could claim that these smooth brown-shelled eggs with rich yellow yolks come from contented Rhode Island Red or White Wyndottes, scratching around in a straw-filled dung heap.

Well, we're running a very close thing with the dung heap shanty town of Rio de Janeiro.'

Sir Neville Bowman-Shaw, who has called the ex-rocker a "silly ***", allowed a pig farm to be set up next to Jobson's house with a steaming dung heap just 10 feet from his back window.