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othing in Edgar Allan Poe’s majestic poem The Raven prepares you for their smell. But Christopher James Skaife, Yeoman Warder and Ravenmaster of the Tower of London, knows it only too well. “Ravens are quite smelly, especially babies, it’s quite pungent, and I only have a small house tucked into the walls of the Tower of London … the ravens like to walk around our house, and they poo everywhere. That was the first thing my wife moaned about.”
Skaife, now 55, has the often described “oddest job in Britain”: he is responsible for the flock – or unkindness – of ravens who call the Tower home. Legend has it that if all the ravens leave the Tower, the kingdom of Britain will fall. These stately guardians – or his naughty children, as Skaife thinks of them – live on the South Lawn and roam the precincts. And Skaife, the sixth Ravenmaster in the Tower’s history, cares for them.
There must always be at least six ravens, so the legend goes. Last week there were eight. Now, only seven.
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