The Water Rats 2008

I have a collection of books depicting the work of Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, a Victorian photographer who worked out of Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast. I love his scenes of working people - fishermen mending their nets,women gutting fish or winding wool.

His most famous photograph is called the The Water Rats. It shows a group of boys bathing naked by a boat with Whitby harbour framed in the background.

Funnily enough it would probably pass the rigorous identification test imposed by Cann Hall primary School in Clacton, Essex that published photographs of children in its newsletter with smiley faces blanking out the children's images.

None of the faces in the Sutcliffe photograph is clear enough for identification. That did not stop the Whitby clergy condemning Sutcliffe for "corruption of the young." Neither did it stop The Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) from buying an imprint. Nor did it stop Sutcliffe making other images of naked boys: Sea Urchins and In Puris Naturalibus, where the boys can be identified.

I don't think it is too much of an exaggeration to suggest that were Sutcliffe alive and taking those pictures today, he would be prosecuted, locked up and have his name placed on the paedophiles' register. What a shame. What a sad world we live in when the behaviour of a perverted minority has imprisoned and debased the most natural reaction in the world - the joy of looking at children.

Life on the back roads

Not to be outdone by the BBC vogue for sending the more articulate of comedians and comedy actors on the documentary trail (Michael Palin, Victoria Wood, Billy Connolly, Griff Rhys Jones), ITV has sent Robbie Coltrane off on yet another celebrity road-doc series - B-Road Britain (Wednesday 9pm).

We can all do this. I'm not talking about TV documentaries - although those too are no longer beyond the powers of ordinary mortals - but travelling the bye-ways. In the early 80s, before we had children, Gill and I decided we wanted to see England so we put together a tour with one underpinning rule: no motorways.

Try it. If you can discipline yourself to avoid the shortest, quickest route, the journey becomes the experience and it's amazing the places you find. Yes, you can make plans, but if there is no urgency to get anywhere fast, you can break those plans too. In fact, that's part of the fun.

In those days we used the Egon Ronay Good Pub Guide to help us choose overnight stops but now it's probably easier to use this web-based guide. We had used the same principle on touring holidays in France, guided by Arthur Eperon's book, Traveller's France and the guides produced by Richard Binns.

I think it was Eperon's publication of Traveller's Britain that influenced our English tour. In this case, the holiday was confined to places south of our home at that time, near Huddersfield.

I'm interested in the distant past so the trip included a lot of stone circles and burial mounds plus chalk drawings such as the Cerne Abbas Giant.

I've been wondering if I was fresh to these shores what some of the "must sees" (outside London)I might include in a round England trip today. Here is a list of 10:

1. Stonehenge
2. Portsmouth Dockyard and HMS Victory
3. Ironbridge
4. Lake District (favourite spots: Grasmere with Wordsworth's house and the Langdales plus a walk up Helvellyn)
5. The Cotswolds
6. Whitby
7. Hadrian's Wall
8. York
9. Lyme Regis
10.Canterbury