But his happy, brown ducks and handsome, green-necked drakes do indeed strut their stuff in an orchard of rare apples. A Herefordshire apple expert, Stan Baldock, made the suggestion, after noticing Barry already had a very rare Catshead apple (this is a large, old cooker supposed to have been enjoyed by Queen Elizabeth I). Whereas the average British duck is killed at 47 days, the Trelough ducks grow on for another six to 10 weeks to achieve their stature. He requires them to feed the ducks with his own formulation, a mixture of wheat, barley and maize.

He doesn't trust the commercial feed merchants; he doesn't know what they put in their feeds, and they won't tell him. But he can hazard a guess: by-products of this and that, biscuits, processed offal, he says "Feathers," he says. "They are 75 per cent protein." As a matter of principle his aristocratiic birds are spared the horrors of modern intensive farming, such as animal proteins in the feeds, hormones, growth promoters, antibiotics.Feed is only one aspect of his careful husbandry. He set out to research the subject thoroughly.In France there are four main breeds of duck; Nantes, Chalons, Barbary and Rouen Barbary ducks are big, tough textured, gamey The Chalons duck is small, compact, less gamey The Nantes is a bland bird The Rouen duck has, in Barry's opinion, the best flavour. It is the one used for the classic pressed duck dish which is the speciality of Paris's oldest restaurant La Tour d'Argent.With the help of a French duck farmer, and summoning up the expertise he had already gained with chickens, Barry experimented with a Rouen duck, crossing birds to get a faster-maturing, leaner duck.By 1991 he had achieved the duck he wanted, and now he farms the breeding stock himself, selling on the day-old ducklings to other farmers to grow. As a Francophile, his penchant for good food and good wine has led him to spend most of his holidays for the last 20 years dining his way across France.While on one of these holidays, he was supping a good claret with a juicy magret de canard, when a thought struck him forcibly: "I can see why we can't make claret like this in England, but surely there's no reason why can't we breed ducks like this?"Barry had recently sold his accountancy business in Bristol in order to pursue his hobby, breeding chickens He now decided to try his luck with breeding ducks.

And it is a phenomenon of our times, having flown into our consciousness during the space of five brief years.So what exactly is a Trelough duck? It's quite a large bird, with a higher proportion of lean meat to carcass than the common British bird (an Aylesbury or Pekin cross, basically a fast-growing, fatty, white bird) The silky eating quality of the Trelough is superb. Barry Clark is not by training a poultry farmer but an accountant. A wafer thin slice of breast is so tender when cooked, that it will break up with only the pressure of tongue against the roof of the mouth.The emergence of the Trelough duck is a curious and inspirational tale. He reckoned that places with picky chefs would jump at the choice to cook a better duck It turned out that he was right. The list of customers for his deluxe Trelough ducks reads like a shortlist for restaurant of the year; Alastair Little and Sally Clarke (Clarke's), Bruno Loubet (L'Odeon) and Joel Antunes (Les Saveurs) in London, Stephen Peter Markwick (Markwick's) and Martin Blunos (Lettonie) in Bristol, Michael Caines (Gidleigh Park) in Devon, Shaun Hill (The Merchant House) in Ludlow and Joyce Molyneux (The Carved Angel) in Dartmouth. So the Trelough (pronounced tra-loo) duck has arrived. So he got on his bike and beat a path to the doors of his favourite restaurants.

"The problem is that it's very toxic in other ways, so we are looking for other mannose mimics which are non-toxic but do exactly the same job."In the future, sugoids are likely to find many other novel uses in many areas of human activity: a sugoid that disrupts the enzyme in sperm that bites through the egg's sugar coating might make a good contraceptive, for instance; hydantocidin, a sugoid made by fungi, is non-toxic to mammals but a potent killer of all perennial weeds; other sugoids are powerful insecticides and pest repellents The age of the sugoid is surely nigh !. BREED a better a duck and the world will beat a path to your door That was Barry Clark's theory, anyway Except that nobody did. Swainsonine, a sugoid found in wild plants in Australia and the US, is almost the perfect mannoid for the job, says George Fleet. Introduce a mannose-like sugoid (or mannoid) to disrupt the coat-building, and the fast-reproducing cancer cells will be recognised and destroyed by the immune system.Of course, other reproducing cells will also be messed up, but this doesn't matter in the short term. Her laboratory began by elucidating the three-dimensional structure of the enzyme, then designing sugoids to fit.Next, George Fleet's team was put to work turning out made-to-measure sugoids.

After examining over 50 molecules, one non-toxic glucose analogue turned out to be a thousand times stronger than glucose. "This is promising, but we need to improve the potency another tenfold to have a viable drug,'', says Louise Johnson.Sugoids are also being put to work to try to prevent the spread, or metastasis, of cancers. Along with many other cells, cancer cells have a coating of the sugar mannose which allows them to escape immune detection. The process is controlled by a glycosidase enzyme, glycogen phosphorylase, whose activity is reduced as glucose levels rise."If we had a glucose-like molecule that was more powerful, we would have a good regulating agent," says Professor Louise Johnson, head of Oxford's Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics. When blood glucose levels are low, the liver puts out glucose by breaking down its stores of glycogen. In diabetics, the liver continues to put out glucose even when blood glucose levels are high. This offers hope indeed for the world's 300m hepatitis-B sufferers.Another disease which may be treatable with sugoids is non-insulin-dependent diabetes - a disease characterised by the liver's failure to regulate blood glucose concentrations.