“It is the bright day that brings forth the adder, and that craves wary walking,” says Brutus in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. There can be few creatures as reviled as the snake, yet they’ve managed to find their way into the beliefs, myths, and cultures of almost every human group with which they share common ground.
I’m an affirmed ‘ophidiophile’. My engagement with wild snakes began with a resplendent male adder when I was eight and off school, sick. On the final day before I went back, my aunt took me for a day out, to get some countryside air into my lungs, to Kinver Edge, a beautiful escarpment, now owned by the National Trust, straddling the Staffordshire/Worcestershire border.
I was very familiar with the lie of the land, having…