HERE is the face of Dick Turpin.

It wasn't sketched by the courtroom artist at the highwayman's York trial, but by a cartoonist from Northamptonshire.

"As a political cartoonist, I am more accustomed to portraying modern-day villains," says Adrian Teal, whose caricatures of Tony Blair and David Cameron appear in the Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere.

"But I was intrigued by the significant gap between what people think they know about Dick Turpin, and the unpalatable truth about the pockmarked ruffian of history."

Many people still imagine the old crook, hanged at York Tyburn in 1739, to be a dashing highwayman on a steed called Black Bess who together made a legendary gallop from London to York. Which is pure horse manure.

No contemporary portrait of the villain exists, so Adrian decided to fill the gap. He based his picture on several sources, including physical descriptions and research into wigs and fashion of the 1730s.

One observer described Turpin, aka John Palmer, as "about five feet nine inches high, of a brown complexion, very much marked with the smallpox, his cheek bones broad, his face thinner towards the bottom... and broad about the shoulders."

Is this pitted phizog spot on? We will carry the verdict of York's foremost Turpin authority tomorrow.

YORK is attracting a new breed of visitor.

Last week street supervisor and Evening Press commentator Paul Willey was cycling to work at 4.30am.

"I turned off Peasholme Green to cut through Spen Lane and enter town via Kings Square when I was met by a fox sat outside the Spen Lane church," Paul tells us.

"I stopped, the fox stopped then shot off up the lane at the side of the church.

"Never mind rats, we now have foxes!"

Lock up your bins...

AFTER reading our item about the young footballers asked to wear sun block to stave off February sunburn, a resident of Tower Place, York, phones up with another tale of our times.

The bulb has gone in the old street light in the adjacent passage. But when she rings the council, she is told it will take some sorting because workmen "are not allowed to go up a ladder any more".

"I just couldn't believe it," our source said. "The problems health and safety cause for us!"

She is a nonagenarian, but tells us "90 is the new 80!"

Updated: 08:57 Friday, February 17, 2006